Frogging a 20 year old UFO
I know 2016 is on trend right now, but I’ve been going through my UFOs and unearthed some even older projects, along with distant memories of my earliest days of knitting. This mysterious shape was the beginnings of the Elfin Bride sweater from Jennifer Stafford’s book Domiknitrix.
In 2007, I was an undergraduate student at UCLA, living in the dorms and just starting to get serious about knitting. I would take the bus to Santa Monica and walk to Joann Fabrics. The options were decent for toy knitting, which was most of what I was doing at that time, but the colors were limited, especially once I needed yarn lighter than worsted weight.
I’d finished one garment at that point, a tank top from one of Debbie Stoller’s Stitch n’ Bitch books. Understanding yarn weights and gauge and sizing was a lot for me. But I found a copy of Domiknitrix in a Borders Books and had to knit this sweater. I had never knitted lace before. I had never finished a full sweater. I didn’t really understand gauge or blocking swatches. But I wanted this sweater.
The book was published before Stafford could finish writing and testing the pattern. I bought it with the promise that I would be able to get the pattern from her website at a later date. So I waited and waited and finally, I was able to download it!
I had just gotten my first credit card (with a $500 limit - so much back then), and it opened up the world of online yarn shopping. I used my baby credit card to place an order with KnitPicks. It was a lot of yarn for toy knitting and also a cotton/linen blend for this complicated lacy sweater because I needed to meet the shipping minimums and knew I wouldn’t be buying any more yarn for a long time. It was a big splurge for me. I remember unboxing it in my dorm room and marveling at all of the colors and all of the potential inside.
I cast on my Elfin Bride pattern with my CotLin yarn and my Susan Boye interchangeable needles. The cables were tough and inflexible, the yarn a little too thick for them, my stitches tight and cumbersome. But it was what got me closest to gauge. It was miserable, slow going.
I spent months knitting the lace section before moving onto the back. I didn’t have enough cables to hold all of my live stitches, so I threaded bright orange yarn through to hold things in place. Eventually, I needed my limited cables back for other projects. Then the sweater got put to the side. Figuring out where I left off, combined with how slow it had been to work, was too much. I always had an excuse to not go back.
A couple of years later, I knitted a different sweater from Romantic Hand Knits by Annie Modesitt, with some of the yarn. I had learned to tackle lace and how to be the boss of my Boye needles. I treasured that sweater for many years.
The styles of both sweaters haven’t aged well; no wonder - they were from almost 20 years ago! But I’ve aged well. Grown as a knitter, but more importantly as a person.
I used to stay in on weekends, watching movies and knitting alone in my dorm room. I would turn down my RA’s offers to join her in the common room for a group movie night. (She was a fellow knitter who didn’t swear and kept a post-it note with the word “bologna” adhered to the cover of her copy of Stitch n’ Bitch.)
I used to assuage my fears of meeting new people or going to new classes by comparing them to knitting projects. “You just take it one step at a time, and learn the new skills as you need them. It’s okay if you have to go back and try again.”
As I frogged the Elfin Bride that ‘twas not to be, I felt so much love and kindness for that quiet young woman. I’m no longer a shy kid who would knit across campus in part because she wasn’t good at starting conversations or making friends. I love seeing friends and I’ve become surprisingly good at chatting with people. I may not have finished that sweater, but trying it showed my inner strength when facing challenges and gave me the perspective to grow as a person one little stitch at a time.
