The Benefit Plan

Another benefit of blogging is that it keeps you honest and on task. At least if you share pictures of in-progress work, that is. So here we go--nothing finished, but lots started.

A cardigan from Quince and Co. Chickadee:

I'm calling this one "Jewelry" as it's loosely based on the Jewel cardigan pattern by Kim Hargreaves and the stitch pattern reminds me of some kind of filigree. Progress on this cardi stopped when I lacked the mental energy to start figuring out the sleeves. I wanted seamless set-in sleeves but didn't really have a pattern to go by. So in the basket it went.

Next I started this top-down cardigan from Brooklyn Tweed's Loft. I'm calling her Lofty, of course.

I'm going for an A-line look with pockets in the front.

This one stalled when I needed to graft together the border edging at the bottom. Sigh...

Then I started a vest, and with renewed vim and vigor knit on it like a crazy woman for about a week:

This one is based on a pattern called Drip-Drop by Hanne Falkenberg. Sort of. I tried really hard to get the pattern--her patterns are usually only available as kits, and they are very spendy. But this one is only available in a book, in Danish, from a couple of Danish yarn stores. The cost of the book shipped to Minnesota was going to be well over $100, so I decided to reverse engineer the pattern from pictures. (I usually don't like doing that because I think the designer deserves to get paid for their hard work, but this time getting the pattern was not feasible.) I'm making some changes and adjustments, and I really should finish this before I forget what I did and have to figure it out all over again. However, I'm back a full circle, and knitting the sleeves for Jewelry again (I have knit the first sleeve cap about four times...):

So would someone please kick me in the rear to get some of these finished?

A Pretty Picture or a Thousand Words?

I would like my blog to be one of those blogs with beautiful pictures. But when I wait to post until I have the kinds of pictures I want, I end up not posting at all, or waiting a month or two before I post. And although I myself enjoy reading and following blogs with nice pictures, I do also enjoy reading blogs that post at least weekly--I hate waiting for a new post for a month!

Getting good pictures means waiting for the perfect light, waiting to have time to take the pictures during daylight, waiting to have the projects at a stage when you can take good pictures, waiting to have time to edit the pictures... the list goes on. And soon it's two months later and I still don't have good pictures. Oops.

Maybe I just need to accept the fact that I'm going to (and do) have a blog with mediocre pictures. Because at the end of the day, the trade off for having good pictures is posting rarely and therefore having few people reading/following the blog. Because it's more fun to follow blogs that post regularly (and I don't mean the kind of once-a-year regular). But then again, blogs with nice pictures are nicer to look at... what a dilemma!

Today I resolve to allow myself to post with mediocre pictures and mediocre text and we'll see how that goes. Hopefully I will end up posting more often. I work on lots of projects that never make it to the blog because I don't have good (or any) pictures, and because I don't have anything smart to say about them. And because I haven't figured out how to post pictures on the blog from my phone (another thing on the to-do list).