Pattern: Starting Point by Joji Locatelli
Yarn: TFA PureWash Fingering in Crystal, (a Club colourway) Highlighter and Peacock. Purple Label Cashmere Sock in Seabreeze. The Sanguine Gryphon Skinny Bugga in Blue Lobster.
Ravelry Project page here.
What an adventure!!! This was only my second time ever doing a mystery knit along (MKAL) and I have to admit, it took a lot out of me. I was fully committed to it. I knit each clue within a few days of it's release every week. I looked forward to the next clue coming out and seeing what we would be doing next. We all know that I struggled with my colour selection for this project but once I had my scheme nailed down I knew that there was no direction this wrap could go in that I wouldn't love. This palette is just SO TANIS and makes me very happy.
Going in to this project, I knew that we were knitting a rectangular wrap and I had assumed that we'ed be starting at one end and working our way to the other, knitting bands and stripes of colour. I was expecting something kinda like Joji's 3 Color Cashmere Cowl design. When we instead started off by knitting 2 triangles I was immediately intrigued! I love a MKAL that throws a few curve balls your way. That's where all the fun comes from! You think you know what direction you're going in and then bam, full 180! If I'm being completely honest, out of the 5 clues I'd say that clues 1 and 5 were really the only curve balls, clues 2, 3 & 4 were quite similar, which made clue 5 all the more exciting! Would I have liked a few more curve balls or unexpected twists and turns thrown my way during the process? Yes. However, there is a fine line between designing a pattern that keeps the knitter constantly on her toes and designing a pattern that is so full of "excitement" that the results are disorganized and chaotic. In this case, those less exciting clues resulted in a beautifully balanced design.
The thing that I am most pleasantly surprised about is just how wearable this warp is! As I was knitting this I was thinking that it may end up too big and bulky to be practical for me, but I was completely wrong. The proportions are lovely, even on my small frame. I wore it to the park with the kids to take these FO shots and half expected to have to take it off in order to do any actual playing but it didn't get in the way at all! I pushed the kids on the swings, spun Micah around in this weird spinny chair thing they have at our park, climbed under this rope contraption to rescue Micah a few times, all the while wearing this elegant wrap. Come the colder months I could definitely see myself wrapping this bad boy around my neck a few times for the ultimate cozy winter scarf.
This was truly an enjoyable knitting experience that resulted in a truly beautiful piece of knitting. I'll admit, the mystery aspect - though really the main focus of this whole experiment - is hard for me. I don't think that it's my preferred way of knitting colourwork projects. Though I am completely in love with my new wrap, there are a few colour placement tweaks that I would have made had I known what I was doing ahead of time. Actually, maybe, maybe not. Maybe I'm overthinking it. I love knitting with colour and generally devote a lot of energy to arranging colours in exactly the order that I want them in, veering a way from that and losing a bit of control is arguably a really good thing for me to do once in a while. I wasn't able to successfully push myself out of my comfort zone when it came to colour selection, but maybe going outside my comfort zone in terms of colour placement is enough for one project! Baby steps. ;)
Did you KAL? I think that my favourite part about the whole thing was knitting the same pattern with so many thousands of knitters all over the world at the same time. It's incredible isn't it? KAL's really are more about the community, a gorgeous FO is the cherry on top!
What should we KAL next?
My current favourite picture!