Knitting Chaos

While Tristan was climbing the walls at Rocksport last evening, I did some knitting. I had a project that my mom had asked me to knit because she couldn't figure out the pattern instructions. I'd had the yarn for awhile, but it was buried on my desk until yesterday's clean up. I'm glad I found it. It felt good to have needles and fiber in my hands again.

The yarn, Red Heart's Boutique Sashay, is one of those new ruffle yarns. The pattern for a frilly knit scarf was, I have to admit, a bit vague.

Two rows into it I realized why my mother struggled. My mother doesn't do messy. She doesn't fool around with things to see what they look like. She tried to follow the pattern as it was written, and ended up not with ruffles but with a boring stack of cone-shaped circles. Lucky for her she has a daughter who can do chaos.

The trick with this yarn is to be inconsistent. There are "holes" to work with when you are putting the needle into the weave to pick up strands. If you knit in every hole you get cones. If you skip one, two or sometimes three, in no particular order or pattern, you get fun ruffles.

For someone who is used to knitting lace and cables, where strict adherence to the pattern is crucial, this is very freeing. The more "mistakes" there were, the more chaotic it was, the more interesting the scarf got. I'm kind of bummed I have to give the finished product back to my mom.

But mom needs some chaos in her life. I'm just sorry her yarn was lost for six weeks in mine.

This is the scarf, sitting on my clean desk.