Have you ever found yourself in the middle of a project and just had to force yourself to move on with it? That is exactly the position I have found myself in lately with a prayer shawl I have been knitting.
I was given the three skeins of yarn and the person who gave them to me asked me if I could make a prayer shawl or shawls with them. I agreed and then decided to use all three skeins, three skeins of Lion Brand Cupcake DK in three different but related colorways in one shawl. The colorways are Mint Chip, Tundra, and Coffee Break and I am alternating them throughout the shawl, which is a simple gridded pattern of knit and purl stitches, as you can see.
At first I really liked the way the shawl was turning out and I liked the colors, especially in the purple and green sections shown at the bottom of the photo above. Then I wandered into a large expanse of dirty browns and grays and I was not so happy, although now, looking back, it seems unsurprising that this would be the case given names like “coffee break” and “tundra”. I began to dread the knitting. You can kind of see that color shift just above the greens and then it is thankfully mostly hidden in the fold.
Today I just put all that aside and told myself I was going to work on this shawl until I reached a place where i was happier with the colors, where I would once again felt like picking it up and knitting a couple of rows here and there. It took me most of the day at a gauge of 5 1/2 stitches per inch on size 4 needles but I never claimed to be a fast knitter. Finally, although I am still knitting with browns, which are never my favorite colors, the effect is lighter and brighter and some other colors are become subtly mixed in again.
Yes there will be more brown. But this project has moved onward from feeling like a burden to something I will enjoy finishing up, eventually. Now I can give myself permission to take a break however, and work on something else, should I desire. I have an impossible number of UFOs, which I will also begin cataloging soon, so my personal goal at the moment is that I have to finish two projects before I can start another. And yet there is hope.
