Another carrot

Breakneck-pace knitting continues at here at Procrastination Central, the hope and dream being that I can finish the super urgent secret project

(hereafter known as SUSP rather than SUP, because it seems I think quite enough about snacking while knitting without emphatic verb reminders)

before next weekend, having got mostly done by the end of Monday. After that the calendar is so full of Things, I won't get any clear stretches of time to make progress on anything but the little unfinished projects that are, frankly, making me more than a little crazy.

Of course, one cannot force oneself to work at full tilt without a carrot, and it's not like having this thing at the end will be my reward, because it's going to leave me forever when it's finished.

This is where a certain knitting friend comes in.

Pretty much literally, in fact, because she knocked at my door the very moment I was looking over a freshly blocked gauge swatch for SUSP.

This friend feels much as I do about yarn (see yesterday's reflections on its dream value and the burden of the unrealized dreams of unused yarn.) And she didn't take a 20-year break from knitting like I did, so she has a fair bit of that sort of burden, some of which had made its way into the back of her car for a drive to the local Goodwill in the interest of freeing her from same.

Having just completed such a stash review myself I know exactly how this felt, and furthermore how grateful I was to have Trish to take the best of my destash into her own, because I knew it would actually get used there. In fact, some of it already has.

So naturally I offered to take it all off her hands. Purely through my own generosity, ahem.

SUSP has forced me to take my time going through the destash box and to consider the possibilities, but I've noticed a recurring theme in my head as I work toward my Monday goal, and that is Hannah Fettig's Mariner Pullover from Interweave Knits Weekend 2010. Every day I feel more determined to make it when all this is done. And although it isn't the first colour I would choose for a wear-every-day sweater to pair with my grey and black base wardrobe, I keep being drawn to it. I mean, it's pretty obvious isn't it that 10 balls of Jo Sharp wool are meant to be knitted up into something very special.

Except that I'm 200 yards short.

So I guess I could either stop eating cookies while knitting so as to go down a size and have enough yarn for it, or hope that the 200 yards is just the buffer you build in so people buy enough yarn to make the pattern, or add in a second colour for the hem and cuffs, try to stretch the rest out as I go, and tie in the second colour with contrasting buttons.

But I kind of love that the pullover is all one simple colour, and I love the drape it has with the existing yarn, so maybe Jo Sharp needs to be something else, like a swingy vest.

And maybe I could knit Mariner with this, for which it looks like there is more than enough:

Either way it's definitely a carrot, if not of the obvious beckoning pattern/yarn combo variety. And it makes me so grateful for things continuing to fall into place the way they do. Thank you, knitting friend!