Selfish

My startitis is causing a bad case of not finishing anything. Oh dear. The terrible thing is I still have it, I am still struggling with an overwhelming urge to keep casting on new projects and going nowhere with them. I have made a decision that on Saturday I will do AT LEAST 20 rounds of my Rose Red and will focus all my knitterly attention on that. I must get it finished. When that is finished I might make a start on Ishbel though I do want to work on my cardigan. I’ll have a think about that.

I need to learn how to say no. I am rather a selfish knitter, as much as I want to talk about it with people and show off my WIPs and FOs at every possible opportunity ultimately I like to knit for myself. I’ll make the odd thing for others such as scarves for my mum and MIL, socks for the husband and baby gifts but about 80-90% of my knitting is for me. Terrible I know but I will look after it and love and cherish it so I think I deserve to be knit for! Others might shrink things or worse never even wear them. I learned this lesson in knitting a cardigan for one of DH’s little cousins and never even getting a thank you from the mother of said child.

Anyway the point I’m getting at is that my knitting is mostly for me and I like it that way. My lovely mum is mostly a process knitter and thoroughly enjoys knitting for others, she recently made me a beautiful cabled cardigan and has made me a lot of things in the past. I have knit her a scarf. I have however promised to knit her socks for her birthday as it’s on the short list of things she has never knit before, well not daytime socks on DPNs anyway, she has knit bedsocks on 2 needles. I don’t mind so much, she only wears a UK size 3 so it shouldn’t take too long and I know she’ll love and appreciate them. Yesterday I was showing off my circle socks to a lady in the office who asked me if I’d knit a pair for her daughter if she bought me the yarn. This is an adult daughter, she’s quite small and wears a size 4.5 so they wont be huge socks taking ages to knit BUT I could be knitting socks for me…or my husband. Why oh why did I say yes? I shouldn’t be so selfish but I am. There’s just the whole problem that people who don’t knit don’t understand the time and effort involved. It’s not about just paying for the yarn, what about the hours to actually knit the socks? I’ve made a bit of a booboo I fear. I can’t now turn around and say no and I wont but it will be a one off.

Speaking of socks I am now on the foot of the first Germany sock, they’re progressing nicely though the cuff is probably longer than it needed to be and I think I’ll make my next pair of stockinette socks with a shorter cuff. They’re looking good though, I’m excited to wear them and can’t wait to wear them in Germany. I have my next pair of patterned socks planned. I’m going to join the herd and knit some Monkeys, the pattern looks great and I’ve seen them done in variated yarns and think they look great so I’ll be using my precious Lauging Yaffle yarn for those. My next plain socks will be the ones for my mum, I plan to cast the both on at the same time on two sets of DPNs so I can work through them together and avoid SSS…not that I suffer from that greatly but it will mean I avoid it and it will probably feel like I’ve knit them quicker.

I promise my next post will have photos of my progress.