Yarn? Over.

I've fallen into a knitting abyss.

I'm a fast knitter, and I knit every day, and I finish up small projects fast and big projects faster than most. I like repetitious patterns in knitting, and I like the routine of knitting every day, so you'd think a pattern with a lot of repetition that I could knit every day would make me the happiest person ever, wouldn't you?

For the second time this year I had to rip out the Swallowtail Lace Shawl right on down to the six stitch anchor because the YO's and the SSK's were wearing me down to a nub. Every row I missed at least one yarn over. I couldn't memorize the pattern, and the yarn striped in an unattractive way, and it just made me unhappy. So rip! It's gone now, just a kinky ball of yarn shoved in the back of the closet.

At least one of you is wondering what this picture of Teching Hsieh has to do with knitting the Swallowtail Lace Shawl. This artist has done a series of year long performance pieces, which I think the Swallowtail Lace Shawl really might be. For this piece he punched a time clock every hour on the hour for one year. I think about this piece sometimes and the repetition and steadfastness of this is inspiring to me. He only missed 131 punches, but descriptions of the piece do not tell you how many yarn overs he missed.