Of Cowls and Hours Spent

I've been commissioned by a coworker to make some cowls for his wife. He calls them loopy things. I like this name better because "cowl" has that awful sound that you can't really enunciate and it just sounds like you have marbles in your mouth no matter how hard you try. It's like the word Iowa. A high school teacher of mine spent a more than a few minutes in class one day describing how Iowa isn't really said, it just falls out of your mouth. "Cowl" I feel is similar although as it's falling out of your mouth, it grabs on to your lip and hangs there making you look like a slack-jawed yokel who wouldn't know a cowl if it strangled them in their sleep.

My coworker today asked how my progress was coming on the loopy things and I told him that I had started the second of three and that I had tried to fix a mistake and ended up needing to restart the whole thing. He asked me how much time I had put into it at that point and I told him about four hours and then he looked at me as if I had started floating above the ground. Four hours and I was just willing to start all over? Just like that? And put at least another four hours into this project?

Well, yeah.

One thing I've learned from knitting is that to make things correctly and perfectly takes time and sometimes you need to start all over. Yeah it takes a while to fully grasp this idea and even if I do need to start over, it doesn't mean that I jump up and start ripping out my knitting. I kick my feet and stomp and refuse to until I absolutely have to. I have abandoned many a projects because of needing to start over and not wanting to put all that time back into it. It's not easy to take something you've spent five, ten, thirty hours on just to rip it all out and have nothing to show for it except a pile of yarn. But sometimes you just have to. I'd rather have a pretty project than a pile of poo. If that means spending an extra four hours on it, so be it. I'll be happier with the finished product.

Knitting takes patience. You can't knit a sweater in an hour.