Right now I have three different sweater projects stuck in hibernation, two dating back to early 2017. One of the three is my yellow and raspberry striped sweater pictured above. Luckily, it's back into the "tipping point" stage and should easily be finished this month. Sometimes stalling out on a project is perplexing even to myself. This one has stripes, which I find fun and addicting to knit. It's a pattern I've made before, so I'm not anxious about fit or whether it will "turn out." So why in the world would I stop working on a project like this one?
If I think back to all the times this has happened, some patterns emerge:
- Something didn't turn out the way I hoped and my frustration sucked the joy from the project.
- I'm worried I'm going to run out of yarn.
- I feel uncertain about my color choices and am questioning myself and whether I like how the project is looking.
- I'm in a slow section of the project and just got bored. AND something else needed to get done and I got distracted and never returned to the project.
- No external deadlines/commitments forcing me to push through my resistance.
And in this case, it was my fear of running out of yarn and my uncertainty over my sleeve color choices that completely killed my momentum on this project. Initially I thought a contrasting, yellows-only sleeve would be fun to pair with the stripes. But I was uncertain how I wanted to combine a variegated yellow and a solid yellow yarn. I knew I didn't have enough variegated to knit the sleeves entirely in it like I wanted to. When I picked this project back up this month, I quickly knit one sleeve and realized my fears of running out of yarn were unfounded. But then I just didn't like how it turned out. And this was after knitting two whole sleeves. Oy vey. So I knit my third sleeve this morning, making it striped. And just like the saying--the third time really was the charm. So I'll knit my fourth sleeve for this sweater this weekend and start finishing seams.
What makes your projects stall out and get stuck in hibernation?