A little knitting...

I'm still here!

So the other day, I was faced with a dilemma. A good friend of the family asked me to knit her a scarf. She had seen a picture online, and wanted me to duplicate it. Easy enough, right? Of course, I'm cursed with the relentless inability to say "no." Even though the request came right in the middle of a couple of other projects and at the onset of my Christmas knitting, I agreed to take up the challenge.

Weeelll, I was fortunate enough to be able to trace the picture my friend saw to the actual pattern (a miracle in itself?), which was free and listed on Ravelry (yay!). It turns out, the scarf, which Family Friend wants sooon, is a fairly intricate cable pattern knit on fingering weight with size 3 needles. What's more? The scarf requested involves four colors, and several skeins of sort of expensive organic wool. (In case you're wondering, the scarf is the lovely Merlie Scarf [Rav link]).

This bring up lots of philosophical questions about why you should to say "no" to unreasonable or impractical requests, and whether you should knit for historically picky, unsatisfiable people, and how to deal with similar delicate situations that arise when people who know you can knit ask for things. I chose not to deal with any of those issues.

Instead, I bought some cheap acrylic WW yarn (Vanna's Choice) in colors somewhat similar to the ones in the picture (a pumpkin orange, sage green, brown, and dusty blue), and proceeded to design my own 2x2 ribbed cable scarf, letting the cables unwind in the middle of the scarf to make life easier, and trying to make it look enough like the picture that Family Friend wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Towards the beginning of the project, I was forced to explain to the yarn (and the pattern, which I was not following) why I was the boss of it: it being the inanimate object and me being The Designer, able to make sovereign decisions and seemingly insane changes to the pattern, even asymmetrical changes, with impunity. It was incredibly freeing and I loved the results. :)