Lost and Found

I’ve gotten well and thoroughly used to how convenient Ravelry is for keeping track of projects. I’ve used it to check the care instructions on yarn knitted years ago, I’ve used it to remind myself to rotate my shawls and hats from time to time so that some don’t end up completely forgotten.

But most of all, I’ve used it to know where I am and what I am doing.

I hadn’t appreciated this for a while until yesterday when I had a good look at my WIP basket and found a complete mystery project. The day before I took a moment to dump all my knitting tools and notions on the livingroom floor, and sort through them all. Apparently this also meant going to my WIP basket and picking up all the hooks and needles that had found their way to the bottom.

All neat – ready to be messed up again!

I didn’t realize this was problematic until, on closer inspection of the WIPs themselves, I found the first 8 inches of a Fall Fields Cardigan. There was no hook attached. No matter – I was off to Ravelry. Where, for some reason, I hadn’t made a single note about this project, including that it existed. Uh oh.

At first I didn’t even know it was the Fall Fields Cardigan, or when I’d started it, or in what size. Finally a hazy recollection of Interweave Crochet helped me track down the pattern. Then I spent half an hour carefully counting stitches to figure out what size this was supposed to be (I can’t quite “read” crochet as reliably as knitting so counting stitches isn’t all that straight forward). The pattern suggests a size which would result in 6″ of negative ease, and I was fairly sure that I wouldn’t have picked that size but something bigger. This still left 4 possibilities.

The hook was more problematic even still, but based on a notion of a general sort of pinkish orangeishness, I looked through my hooks and figured I had used a size 4, which happens to be that sparkly color.

And then I spent a while figuring out where in the pattern I was.

Now I’m working on it again, and I’ve updated all this info on Ravelry. It would appear, though, that some of the yarn I’ve bought for this project has wandered out of the WIP basket and has possibly been used for something else. What I have simply isn’t enough for a cardigan.

The whole thing may be doomed, but it is still kind of pretty. Besides, there are a lot of cut yarn ends for some reason, so I can’t rip back either. I figure I can always get more, and in a stripy thing like this, it doesn’t matter as much if the dye lots don’t match perfectly. Staying positive, that’s the thing.

I trust that without Ravelry this kind of thing would happen to me often enough to render this hobby very frustrating. But even Ravelry wouldn’t help if I didn’t update it religiously.