Frustrating Yarn Week

Last week I talked about the uneasy alliance between my art making and my crochet work. This week was all about the frustrations of figuring out a few different crochet projects. We dipped out of town for the week while our youngest kiddo was at a week-long internship/camp and so I packed some of my yarn projects I’ve been wanting to tackle and figure out. It seemed like a good idea when I was packing but turned into a week of frustrating time spent and several project dead ends.

The unfinished WIP from 2019

This project had been on the shelf for a loooong while. I had paused it originally because I was running out of yarn so had to get a second skein from the indie dyer and then had to figure out how to integrate the 2 colors of the “same” color of yarn that weren’t even close to the same color. Sometime after figuring out that dilemma, I stopped work again because I wasn’t happy with how the individual pieces were coming together.

I pulled it out to finish it and spent almost two full days trying to figure out where my place was in the work and then figuring out how to connect the pieces. I did a few of those and was only meh on my results.

The point at which I decided to quit for reals was when I realized I couldn’t tell which was the right and which was the wrong side and I had no idea if the pieces I had attached were right or wrong and when I laid it out further realized it was misshapen as hell. A certain amount of misshapenness is to be expected from unwashed/unblocked natural fibers. This was WAY beyond that.

What did I learn from the misshapen WIP?

If I put projects away for this length of time, there’s probably a good reason. Trust myself with that and ditch it for art-making scrap or reclaim the materials. I definitely should have stopped at the point I needed to get more yarn and it didn’t match.

I also got a really good look at how much my skill has developed from 2019. My early work on this project isn’t bad necessarily but it isn’t the same caliber as what I produce now. It was nice to see I’ve come a long way since then but also a bit disappointing that I thought I was doing pretty well then?

It’s also a testament to me needing to for-real-this-time-buckle-down and practice gauge. I am consistently larger than gauge most of the time and never more so than with this particular pattern designer. It should have only taken one skein of yarn. If I had a better control of my gauge, I could have made it through the project with the original skein of yarn.

The Powerball pattern search

This project involves an absolutely massive skein of yarn: a Power Ball from Yarn Snob which contains 2,185 yards of yarn. I got this beauty as a birthday gift several years ago and it’s a delight of abundance! But I have been stumped this whole time as to what to do with it. This week seemed the perfect time to spend some brain power on finding a pattern that might work with this material.

Over the course of a couple of days, I’ve started five different patterns with this yarn without success and looked at maybe twelve more. One pattern that calls for just over 2,000 yards seemed like the perfect solution. I did the initial 414 stitch base chain and spent at least two and a half hours doing the first row only to realized the yarn is too variegated to show off the stitches in the pattern.

What did I learn from the variegated Power Ball?

One of the things I relearned here is that very often certain types of variegation will not work with crochet. I don’t have a good solution here. While I love this yarn, I’m leaning toward selling it because I hate for it to go to waste. I’ve spent some dedicated time to find it a pattern and I still don’t know what to do with it to showcase it.

Variegation being tricky is not a new problem for me. I gravitate to yarn with a lot of color. There’s something connecting those splashes of color to some of my favorite abstract art works in my brain. BUT! Often they don’t produce a very good finished product particularly if it’s a pattern that has a complicated/fancy stitch pattern that a solid color or tonal yarn would do better at showing off. Over the course of the past few years I’ve learned that due to the types of patterns I like to do, solid/tonals work better and if I want a lot of color I have to add them in with multiple yarns instead of relying on variegation. I maybe figured that out AFTER I received this yarn as a gift.

I had originally wanted to use the whole skein to make one project. When I started casting around for patterns and coming up short, I downsized in hopes of still finding something what would work and making two or three projects. I ended up abandoning that line of thought as well. There just isn’t a good pattern option that I could find for this yarn. I feel like I attempted to be flexible here but still with poor results.

Broader Themes

I set out to do some problem solving this week and I did solve some by just declaring bankruptcy. Sometimes creative problem solving looks like scrapping the work and staring over. Sometimes it looks like you can’t solve the problem with the tool you are wanting to use.

I spent a lot of this time this week frustrated. While I don’t love the feeling of hitting dead end after dead end, it does happen from time to time. I’ve had to remind myself multiple times this week that I did bring ALL of the my problem children with me on this trip. On purpose. So, you know, I did it to myself.

It’s also a good reminder that I am constantly working on building my skill set and building up my problem solving abilities. “Not right now” is an annoying thing to run up against but it’s always good to set some stretch goals. I know that I tend to do the things that I know, or know are easy, over and over again. I think we all do that. So stretching myself this week to think on these complicated problems is good for my brain. Or so I keep telling myself.

What are you frustrated with? Where are your points of friction in your current project? What are you learning from those? I’d like to hear your story. Email me or start a conversation by leaving a comment on this post! If you’d like to keep up with what I’m working on, I’d love to have you as a newsletter subscriber. I include blog posts from here, cool things I find online, and pictures of my dogs. Sign up here.