And sometimes you just have to persevere...

After my ruthless frogging post yesterday, I was playfully accused of using whatever means necessary to get that WIP count down. LOL Yeah, well...that's not entirely untrue, I guess. It would have worked better had more of those rip-victims actually been on my active WIP list. But hey! Eliminating projects that have no future and hold no joy is just not a bad thing in my mind. In fact, it is an act of mercy to spare the yarn your ill-willed feelings while knitting it into something you don't really like anymore. No fiber deserves that! (Well, maybe some really crappy acrylics do, but...ahem...)

Anyway, today I opted for the opposite of ruthlessness and decided to persevere instead by finally finishing that damn green purse. Honestly, I don't love it. I mean, it's a cute pattern, but I'm not wild about how it turned out. (For the sake of full disclosure, I substituted yarns and I know it would have worked much better in the original yarn that was called for, Berroco Suede.) I could easily have decided to just chuck it into the Goodwill bag as it was and been done with it. But I figured, hey, I have the fabric for the lining, and I could easily sew in a snap as a closure rather than fidget with a zipper. So that's what I did. I added the tassle and called it done.

I still don't love it, and I'll never use it, but I have a 12-year-old girl here who was most happy to accept a new purse out of the blue today, so it's all good. LOL

So, between the frogged No-So-Basic-Black yesterday and the finished purse today, my WIP count is down to :::drum roll, please!::: NINE!!!!! I made it to the single digits, and I've still got three days to go! 

Granted, I think I was being a tad overly optimistic the other day when I indirectly posited that I could complete the purse AND a scarf AND a pair of socks by the end of Saturday. I can tell you now, that just ain't happenin'. No way. Now how. But if I can at least finish EITHER the scarf OR the pair of socks, then I'd be very, very happy with my January Finishing Extravaganza. (As it is now, I am just one "very" happy about it...but then I'm known to be an overachiever.) 

The silly thing is that I know my single-digit status is going to be short-lived. I just know it. I mean, there's that silk/mohair tube scarf waiting in the wings to be added back to the active list. And there is the two-row scarf I started last week and then immediately slapped myself on the hand and didn't even add it to the WIP list (nor have I touched it since...it is in time out for my own sake LOL). And then there is this...

It's Anne Hanson's Rivolo pattern, for which I happen to have the perfect (I think) yarn -- my recently handspun Briar Rose BFL. The Loopy Ewe Spring Fling group (Ravelry) is having a KAL in February, and the theme is Knitspot patterns. I have two of Anne's patterns that I've wanted to try, so this will be perfect! 

The only thing I'm noticing is that of the three hanks of yarn I ended up with, none of them are similarly colored. LOL This has nothing to do with Chris's dyeing and everything to do with my ignorance about how to divide roving for spinning. Instead of dividing it lengthwise (as I now know is what you're supposed to do), I kept whopping off chunks of length, then dividing those lengthwise (follow?), so I have one hank that is very brown, because that part of the roving was largely brown, then another than is brown and green, and the last is mostly green. My solution to this is that rather than trying to alternate skeins every couple rows as is recommended when working with hand-dyed yarn, I think I'm going to knit using the yarn in that order...the brown hank, then the brown/green, then the green...and call it a design feature of the scarf. LOL 

What can I say? Rationalizations R Us! ;)