Friday, July 06, 2012

Flashback Friday: Shalom Cardigan

So, I learned to knit in college and made my handy dandy felted slippers, some equally useful felted mittens and then didn't really make anything for a while. Fast forward a few years and I had just given birth to my daughter. She was nearing a year old and into everything. As with most parents of children this age much of my free time (heh, free time as a parent of a little - funny right?) was spent supervising her various pursuits to keep her from coming to harm. While necessary and at times highly amusing, there are only so many times you can watch a ten month old empty and refill the laundry basket before it loses some of it's tremendous excitement. Around this time I saw this post on the Soule Mama blog about her Shalom Cardigan. "Hey," I thought to myself, "That looks useful and snuggly. The pattern is free and my LYS has yarn. I know how to knit, I know how to purl. Never mind that I have never made a sweater and am the most sleep deprived that a person can be without violating the Geneva Convention - I can do this!"
Success! Shalom Cardigan
 Somewhat surprisingly, I did - with modifications even (with the help of much handholding by and blind faith in the project comments on Ravelry). This was also early into my discovery of Ravelry and such was my state that I didn't even record the dates of this project so I don't know how long it took. I know it took a while because mostly it was accomplished in groups of seven or ten stitches before I had to go "parent" (read: keep my daughter from wrapping dirty clothes around her neck or use chunks of cat fur as a teething toy). I have trouble describing my sense of awe when it was completed, but also the joy of having accomplished something that would stay done. This feels huge when most of your life revolves around a series of tasks that will just have to be repeated in a few hours (feeding, diapers, cleaning, laundry, lather, rinse, repeat).
Note: These pictures were taken in February of 2011, a good, oh, three years after I finished knitting the thing.
 So deep was my satisfaction, the doneness of it so completely psychologically fulfilling, that I can probably point to this little cardigan as the moment Things Got Serious between me and my knitting. From that point in 2008 on, I've pretty much always been working on something.
My daughter's idea of the perfect knitwear modeling pose from that same day. Posting it too just because I can. 

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