Sometimes You Have to Unravel It

Yesterday, I unravelled a jumper.

Not a few rows. Not a sleeve that had gone slightly awry. Almost an entire jumper.

I had been knitting it in the most magnificently beautiful cashmere. I knew I wanted to make a jumper with it, I found a pattern I liked, chose a size and started knitting. And I kept knitting.

But somewhere along the way, I began to have the feeling that something wasn’t quite right.

The fabric wasn’t falling in quite the way I had imagined. I wasn’t sure about the size I had chosen. Knitted with the yarn held double, it was becoming a more substantial garment than I had pictured when I started. None of these things was necessarily wrong. But together, they were enough to create that niggling feeling that the finished jumper wasn’t going to be something I loved.

By then, I had knitted the entire body. I was at the point where I needed to add the sleeves.

That is quite a lot of knitting to walk away from.

I tried it on. I looked at it. I thought about whether I could make it work. And then, rather than doing anything immediately, I left it alone for 24 hours.

The next day, I came back to it and knew.