Little Birds
June 5, 2012
I’ve been trying to keep my craft posts somewhat brief in the description area. This sweater has a little bit of a story to it. Not necessarily an exciting story, but a story nonetheless.
Several years ago I started this sweater that I fell in love with from Twist Collective. Except I changed it from having the little sitting birds to having little swallows, because swallows are purty. My dad bought me the yarn as a Christmas gift (or was it Birthday?), and they didn’t quite have the color of tan that I wanted so I got an off-white and experimented with tea-dying. And then I started the sweater. This is back when I still lived in Long Beach, which means that it was at least 4 years ago.
I kept picking it up every winter for a short period of time, and then putting it back down after I’d get frustrated with some part of the instructions. Last fall I started working at a yarn store, and started thinking about knitting all the time, and decided I needed to finish it. When I picked the instructions back up I realized how easy they were now that I had been thinking about knitting all the time and had not immediately put it back down after the holidays (as I have in most years past.)
So I was knitting on it and getting close to finishing… And then I ran out of yarn. Gosh darnit. I went to our competing yarn store, where I bought the yarn all those years ago. They had a few remnants of that yarn which they had since discontinued, but of course only in such lovely colors as salmon pink and sage green—not the original cream, or by the miracle I was hoping for in a magical color that would match the tea-dyed yarn. SO. I found another fingering weight yarn in off white, took it home, tea dyed it, and to my delight it was pretty darn close to the original yarn. Not perfect, but close.
I finished the sweater, washed it, blocked it, and low and behold you can barely tell that the yarn on the shoulders is not the same as the rest of the sweater. I even forget, sometimes, unless I’m really looking at it and thinking about it.
I’m happy to finally have finished it because it is quite a lovely sweater. And it is one of the few things that I have ever knit that people actually very rarely ask me if I made it, and when I tell them I made it they’re surprised. Which is pretty fun. I usually take a lot of pride in having hand made things that look hand made (which in my mind this sweater does), but it is still somehow a bit of an ego boost when people are surprised that something so intricate, or complicated, or well made (or whatever it is about this particular sweater that catches people by surprise) can still be made by hand.