Aeons (but finished!)

I have a confession to make today about exactly how long a certain project has taken me to finish.

But first, in a follow up from my last post about heating options, this week I bought an 220W underdesk heater from Herschel. It’s an infrared panel heater, which at 220W is significantly lower powered than the 1KW heater I’ve been intermittently using to heat my study through this winter. We’ll see how we go with that, but all I’m saying for now is that this may be the gateway drug into home automation that I really didn’t need.

Also, given the email I got from Bulb about their price increases from April, I’m wondering whether I may have got my priorities in the wrong order. I do still think we need to get off gas, but maybe first stop should be a battery to get the most out of our solar panels. We’ll never get as much back when we export as we could save by just using that power, after all.

But on to embarrassing admissions. I finally finished the turquoise Colinette jacket mid-December.

So why is that embarrassing? Because I did a quick search on the blog to see when I might have first mentioned it, and it turns out that in February 2006 I had the body and a sleeve finished.

2006! That’s 16 years ago! That’s before I moved in with Clarkie. This top has moved house twice before being finished.

I can’t tell you how many other things I’ve knitted in that time. I’ve made so many pairs of socks, let alone everything else. All I can say is that I really didn’t like knitting with those needles, and I really didn’t want to think about sewing it up and weaving in ends, let alone putting in a damned zip. I wasn’t wrong either, those things sucked. But the finished jacket is cozy, and warm, and bright. And already pilling, but that’s to be expected with such oddly spun wool.

So, what do we learn from this?

• Amazing colour is not always the greatest reason to buy wool, and novelty yarn (even when it is 100% wool!) is something I should avoid. I usually do and did even back in 2005 (when I must have bought the yarn), so I’m not really sure why I fell for this stuff.
• Turns out I’m at least as much of a process knitter as a product knitter. I always thought I leant heavily towards knitting for the product, but apparently when the process sucks I’m out.
• Although not totally out. I’m stubborn enough that even a project that takes me 16 years and lives in a box for most of those will damned well get finished in the end. Possibly only if I like the thought of the end product enough though.

This is how I ended up stitching it up, for anyone interested. With a crochet hook. Possibly it could have been done with sock yarn, but where am I going to find sock yarn that matched? And that picture was from December 2020. It really has taken a timeout after every step.

The zip ended up being hand sewn, because I couldn’t work out how to get the whole thing under the foot of my sewing machine. I pinned it so carefully, but I still don’t seem to have got it 100% flat. This was also the first time I’ve shortened a zip, because why would that be easy?

So yes. 16 years in the making. But I am enjoying wearing it now (finally!) and I’ve already had a few compliments on it. I guess it was worth it?!