Second Chance Spider Part 1

I haven't always been a relatively fearless knitter. In fact, I was afraid to even try knitting in the round until this time last year.

Up until I made my Pink Ice Cream Mitts, all I knitted were scarves. After I made those gloves and a few others, I felt confident I could handle anything in spite of the fact that I'd not yet tried to do a great many knitting techniques.

Spurred on by my new-found bravado, I ordered some Skacel Merino Lace and set about trying to knit October is for Spinners sometime last November. I tried hard to make it work for a month or more before I realized it just wasn't coming out right and gave up. Why wasn't it working out? For starters, the "laceweight" yarn I was using was extremely lightweight. More like cobweb than anything else I've ever encountered. This made the gauge waaaay too open and airy for the twisted stitch pattern that forms the spider to ever take shape properly.

The second point of failure was my knitting skills. They just weren't up to the task at the time. I lacked the full understanding of how stitch patterns work, how lace works, how cables work. My patience wasn't so great either, so I found myself wanting to fly through it in a hurry. That doesn't work so well, now that I think of it.

So The Spider hit the Frog Pond, and I've been too scared of it ever since to bother with it....

Until I recycled that first sweater.

That first sweater, the grey Ralph Lauren Polo cabled sweater, decided that it wanted to be The Spider as I was unraveling the first sleeve. It said, "Wouldn't I be beautiful all knit up into that scarf? Wouldn't I be soft? Wouldn't I be lovely?" I said, "Yes, as a matter of fact, you would. Let's do this thing."*

And that was that. So the whole time I was unraveling the rest of the sweater, wrapping the harvested yarn into hanks, steaming the kinks from the hanks and winding the straightened hanks into center-pull balls (BALLS! Not EGGS!! Yaaaay!), I was imagining how lovely this damned intimidating spider was going to be once it was all finished.

I cast it on yesterday, after an interesting and in-depth preparation process that will hopefully streamline this whole process. That process will be the subject of my next post.

_{* Yes, I realize it makes me seem a bit crazy, what with talking yarn and me talking back to it. Just to assure you that I'm not completely and totally off my rocker (at least not in a bad way), I'm adding the little disclaimer that the above conversation is metaphoric. :P}