swatching

I despise making gauge swatches.  I would rather make a guess and, guessing wrong, have to give whatever I've made away than make a gauge swatch.  I've given a sweater away for that very reason, but at least I had the experience of knitting the sweater, which I guess is what I really wanted.

But making swatches to explore stitch patterns, textures, and motifs, or how two stitch patterns work together:  that I love.  I love comparing how stitches look different in different yarns and with different needles.  I even love charting the stitch patterns on graph paper and making small tweaks to see how the pattern changes overall.   I sit on the couch and surround myself with stitch dictionaries and graph paper, pencils, erasers, a red pen, lots of needles, and whatever scraps of yarn I have laying around.  I've spent the entire last week doing just that.  I've had plenty of failures, but I don't mind those at all.  Even the failures teach me something.

The past three weeks have been incredibly snowy and cold.  The only way I can see to happily get through these weeks is wool and bamboo needles in front of the wood stove.