Brilliant Mistake

I started knitting years ago when my kids were little.  It was a way to fill the time when I was spending so much time sitting in a room with kids watching Elmo, Kipper, Calliou, and J.J. The Jet Plane (I can still sing all the songs from all of these shows).

I am not a great knitter.  As with cooking, I am a recipe girl.  I have to write everything down and double check a lot.  I can't breeze along, chatting and I don't understand enough to ever create my own pattern or modify one in any significant way.  But I like to try new things, so have done cables, lace patterns, sleeves, and other things as I grew more confident.

Early on, I knitted a lot of clothes for the kids.  Gorgeous cable hoodies, striped cardigans, a dress for my daughter, hats, scarves.  But they grew out of them so fast.  I kept giving them to nieces and nephews.  I switched to making toys -- monsters of various sorts.  But in the last few years, I lost my mojo.  I knit a few baby blankets but they took forever.  I would barely pick up the needles at all.

Recently, I got the urge to knit.   I decided to knit something for myself.  I had made a few sweaters for myself in the past but not for a while.  I got a great pattern for a vest that could be knitted all in one piece.  It felt good.  I got my mojo back and was really enjoying knitting again.  Before the vest was even done, I got materials to make scarves for the kids and another sweater for me, this time from an amazing book of Knit Kimonos. But as I was finishing the vest, I, oddly, ran out of yarn.  Got more.  Finished.  Put it on and there was a huge ruffle on the butt.  I didn't remember that being in the pattern.  Realized that the reason I'd run out of yarn was that at a point when I was supposed to add two stitches at two places in a row, I'd instead added stitches the entire row between the two spots.  And I had done this three times! Oops. 

Rather than view this as failure, I have decide to consider it a brilliant mistake.  My first modification to a pattern.  I rather like the ruffle -- it is like a bustle.  It gives the vest an oddly romantic profile.  Or a peacock pride.  I will just try to keep the ruffles off the kimonos.