I've been knitting for a while now. Excluding those years when I knew how to knit but didn't do it that much, I've been actively knitting for almost two decades. Thanks to the internet and to the KnitList, I became a multiple-project knitter fairly early in the game. That means, of course, that for almost two decades, I've had multiple projects on the needles.
When you have multiple projects on the needles, some projects wind up being finished faster than others, even accounting for things like gauge and size. Sometimes, projects seem to falter, and shudder to temporary halts. They lurk in the background, waiting but not progressing. We call these projects UFOs (Unfinished Objects).
Usually, UFOs come out of hibernation and get finished or frogged back to yarn before they've lingered too terribly long. But sometimes they lurk in the bottom of the yarn basket for years.
And years.
And sometimes, they lurk for more than a decade.
I've had two of these. The first was the Pre-Columbian Shawl. I started it in about 1996 and didn't finish it until 2008.
One can almost understand how a project that big (it's about 6 1/2 feet wide) could take a long time to finish. But given the speed with which socks can be knit, it's a bit mind boggling to realize that the second UFO of long standing took 17 years to finish.
I'm not claiming to be a super speedy sock knitter - my shortest sock completion was two weeks, but I'm more likely to take up to six weeks to finish a pair, since I'm usually using the socks as my "on the go" project, while time at home tends to be spent on bigger things. Six weeks. Not six months. Not six years. And certainly not SEVENTEEN YEARS!
The poor things went through a time of neglect, and then they lost their pattern, and then the pattern surfaced, but the socks were in hiding, and then the socks reappeared and I borrowed their needles, .... rinse repeat.
Thanks to a recent decision to clean out the Yarn Closet, and to resurrect old projects and get things DONE instead of just starting new ones, the Luxury Sawtooth Socks from Blackberry Ridge (no longer available in their kit), are finally finished and ready to wear
Aren't they lovely?
It ALMOST makes me think that a bit of colder weather would be worth it. Just for a day though.
With socks like those..who wants to wear shoes...love the pattern and colors...
Posted by: Bb | March 24, 2013 at 10:49 AM