Knitting Procrastination: So Many Ideas, So Little Confidence

Since I’ve been sewing more this year than I have been in the previous few, I’m finding I’m also feeling more ambitious in the knitting department. I’ve made scarves and such over the last few years, but I’m feeling like I want to do more. I want to make sweaters, and possibly, at some yet undetermined future point in time, socks.

I’d been mulling this over in the back of my mind when K-Line started posting about a project she had going based on this pattern:
For source click here
I really, really, really like that sweater. Someday, I will probably make one…
However, it’s been a long, long time since I made a sweater. Once I had kids, I had trouble knitting because if I was home and sitting down, they took that as their cue that it was time to nurse and/or cuddle (both much more important than knitting). Since they now all have interests and activities that don’t involve being seated on my lap and they do their eating at the table, my lap is sometimes free. I should be able to both start and finish a sweater in a decent amount of time. I must have thought too long and too hard about the starting part because I began thinking I needed an easier (and smaller) sweater project first so I could get through it and feel like I’d accomplished something before I started on a more challenging one for myself. 
So I went back to Ravelry and started looking for kid’s sweater patterns. I also went to my Mom’s house and raided her bookshelf of vintage knitting patterns. I did find a few of my Mom’s to bring home for the borrowing, particularly with my boys in mind. Something classic and a little bit preppy for them will eventually be on my agenda. On Ravelry, I found this:
For source click here

I wouldn’t plan to make it quite as long as the picture, but otherwise, it is just about perfect for my daughter. It also fits my other criteria for the kind of project I was looking for to begin a delve into sweater-making. It’s an easy pattern. No fancy cables, no buttonholes, just shaping and a few rows done in a contrast color.

So I thought I had things all figured out…

Then I said something to Pete about wanting to make sweaters and how I’d like to make him one too. I kid you not, within 10 minutes he had picked out a pattern and a color. He doesn’t usually have that many opinions about my projects, even when I’m planning to make something for him, so I was happy that I’d sparked his interest, but I looked at the computer screen and I said “That’s exactly what you want? You like all those cables?” He said “yes, that’s exactly what I want. It’s cool.” OK. Yes, it’s cool and it really does look like something Pete would buy as ready-to-wear. If I’m going to put all the effort into knitting a sweater (even if I enjoy the efforts) I do want it to be a loved and worn item in the end. The color he said he wanted (after first saying dark grey, but then realizing that being custom-made, he could pick any color in the rainbow) is “burnt orange”.  So now I’m on the hunt for burnt orange yarn. Not so orange that he will look like a walking Cheeto (his description, not mine), but not so burnt that it looks brown. It’s a hard thing to determine by computer monitor, orange not being one of those colors that tends to pick up true-to-life under flash photography. 

The pattern he liked:


Click here for source
That’s a lot of cables.


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