Design dreams

(See also, alternate title: A break from the photo montage.)

So, like any knitter, I buy yarn and then it doesn’t turn into what I’d planned. In this specific case, I have roughly 1760 yards of ultramarine laceweight sitting around. This number boggled me when I calculated it. I have no idea why I bought this much yarn when I only needed half of it for the now long-dead dreams of the Advent calendar scarf. I think I’d planned to knit some fingerless mittens with it, too, but who knows. It’s beautiful and I’m glad I have all of it.

In something seemingly unrelated, my aunt got me the most beautiful shawl/stole for Christmas. It’s wonderful, looks like a peacock’s tail, and is from Malaysia. Even though previously I thought that I wasn’t a shawl person, possessing this shawl has immediately reversed this thought process. This shawl is amazing, beautiful, and just wearing it makes me want to knit ten million shawls to wear.

Naturally, my 1760 yards of ultramarine laceweight suddenly gained a purpose. But when I started cruising Ravelry for shawl patterns to knit, none of them seemed to click with me. When I search for a pattern, I have a very specific criteria in mind, and if a pattern doesn’t meet that criteria, then I skip it. What I wanted from the Rav search engine was something rectangular with a nice lace repeat that was repeating, slightly Turkish, and centered out (by centered out I mean something like this, not this). I always go into a search with high expectations and then when they aren’t met, I sulk and pout and frown until…

I’ll just design a damn shawl. And yes, it will probably be grafted together in the center.

So that brings, what? A lace panel vest, a t-shirt cardigan, and now a shawl to my list? (I also want to toy around with making a notoriously difficult music score into a knitted blanket, recreating Hope’s scarf from Final Fantasy 13, and knitting lanscapes… but that’s a blog post for a different day.) I’ve got design dreams, big time.