The Sweater Project: Keep Moving Forward

This week as I worked on the yarn for my handspun sweater project, I was reminded of a quote from Walt Disney (as featured in one of my favorite Disney movies, "Meet the Robinsons"):

“Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
–Walt Disney

 I often think of this quote in terms of my business and my crafting. Sometimes things just don't work out the way we want them to, and we just have to keep going. That's what has happened with my sweater project.

I spun my first skein of yarn and I got this:

It's a really pretty skein, and I like it a lot. Unfortunately, though, after using up approximately 20% of my singles this skein was only 55 yards bulky weight. I was worried I wouldn't have enough yarn to make any kind of a sweater at that rate.

Turns out, I was right. I finished spinning all the singles and I got this:

It looks like a lot of yarn, and it is, depending on the perspective. It's about 15oz of bulky weight yarn, but it comes in at only 268 yards. Not enough for a full-sized sweater.

I was pretty bummed about that for a little while, but then I remembered that I still had this yarn in my stash:

This is 880 yards of worsted/aran yarn that I dyed myself to use for a capelet. I decided instead that I'm going to make it into a sweater. I'm planning to knit Rusted Root with this yarn.

The other yarn will still have a purpose, never fear! I think I'm going to knit Shrug This with it or maybe the smaller version of Liesl. If I don't get around to it for a while there may even be another pattern that speaks to me even more. So I'm not at all worried about it.

I'm just going to keep moving forward - you never know what fun adventures you might find when you do that! :)