Sometimes I astonish myself with my ability to ignore the things I know about myself.

I know that I find it hard to ignore mistakes in my knitting. And yet I will still leave a beautiful project in a bag, thinking I can ignore the error and keep knitting. Until eventually I wake up and realise that I need to rip out the mistake and correct it. More than a year later!

This is my Briochevron Wrap (by Stephen West) which has just made it to the top of the works in progress (WIP) pile again. I’ve finished my Granito, and I’m really excited to get going on this again. I think it will be my main summer knitting project, and I’m keen to make as much knitting time as possible this summer. Boost Your Knitting has either gone to press, or is about to, and I am ready for some time off.

But my Briochevron Wrap isn’t the only project where I ignored myself for quite some time, before giving in to the inevitable ripping…

Do you remember the scrappy socks I was knitting? I was feeling pleased with myself for finishing off some deep stash yarn, and I kind of knew that I wouldn’t have enough of the striping yarn to complete two socks even with the contrast cuffs, heels and toes. I typed the following in that blog post:

I’m not sure whether there will be enough of the stripey yarn to work the second sock to exactly match. It was only a 50g ball to start with, so I might end up with half a foot in the pink. I’m OK with that. I do like things to match and be neat, but these socks were more about finishing up some languishing stash, so a bit of asymmetry in the name of thrift is fine by me.

Good grief! I even acknowledged it there. What was I thinking?? I’ve finished knitting the socks, as you can see. And look! The stripey yarn wasn’t enough so I do indeed have half a pink foot. And do you know what?

I DON’T LIKE IT!

I am such a numpty. I’m not sure that I can bring myself to rip these out, and make them symmetrical, but next time I write something like that, I need to remember that I am still ME. And I would be much happier if I divided the ball of yarn equally, and both socks had the same half a foot of contrast.

Please someone remind me of this in the future. My brain is somewhat family-frazzled at the moment, and I’m not hearing myself at all.

In good news, I realised that all my Boost-Your-Knitting-related unfinished projects were making me feel under some kind of daft pressure, so I went in to my Ravelry Notebook and marked them all as hibernating apart from this months’ socks. Ahhhhhhhh. That is the sound of me letting off the release valve! Now I just have Briochevron and Heartgyle on the go, and the socks are nearly done. That feels totally and utterly a million times better. I can’t quite believe it took me so long to think of doing that. I find it really helpful to keep track of everything on Ravelry (it helps me no end to write down what needle size I’ve used for example), but all those projects didn’t need to be at the top of my notebook page. Now I can just un-hibernate each one at the start of the knitalong month and enjoy other projects in the meantime.

Do you find it easy to recognise yourself, and make your projects as enjoyable as possible? Or like me, do you sometimes take a while to notice what’s right in front of you? I’d love to hear what you feel in the comments.