Reknitting

That's what I've begun doing this week. I took my purple sweater (that infamous purple sweater) and ripped it out because 66 pounds later it was now too big. I'm reknitting it to my new size. You have no idea (unless you are a knitter who recycles her yarn), how painstaking it is to unknit a sweater. You'd think you could just start raveling and go for it. For part of the way you can, but if your sweater is a Jackie Fee type with grafted armholes, you're going to have some very tedious stitch by stitch unraveling when you get to that point. If your yarn is sport weight and dark colored it will be tedious unraveling indeed. Then when you get to all those points where you wove the yarn in you will also have a challenge to unweave before raveling further. The unknitting process didn't take as long as the knitting (thankfully), but it wasn't the work of ten minutes either.

Now I'm starting at the bottom, once again and I'm remembering all over how slow this sweater went the first time. It's smaller, it should go more quickly, but it's still 204 stitches per round on size 3 needles. It's not going all that much more quickly. I figure that maybe by February...Oh well I guess I need to stop complaining about it and just start knitting. It's just that everytime I work on knitting while the Red Sox are playing baseball they lose (or so it seems) so I'm sort of banned from knitting during Red Sox games. I wish it worked with the dreaded rivals it would give me more knitting time for sure.

Anyway, it's the time of the year when I like to knit and my last project went so quickly I really shouldn't complain. Besides the yarn was free (except for my time in the spinning process) and it's really too pretty to abandon. So let the re-knitting contine (at least as soon as the game is over!).

I wish I had some great metaphorical comments to add to all of this, but I don't. I know that unknitting is an exercise in patience and that the reknit sweater isn't going to be identical to the old one, but I really don't have any great insights to compare reknit purple sweaters to, at least not tonight.