Scurvy Yarn Projects

Occasionally, I find myself knitting things I don’t particularly want to knit, with yarn I don’t particularly like. Currently, I am slowly knitting my way through a dust rag, using Lion Brand’s Homespun in Metropolis, which is a puffy black and white yarn. Normally, I’m a fan of Lion Brand’s Homespun because even though it’s mildly difficult to work with, it machine washes and dries and gets softer with use and washing, yielding articles that are soft, warm and comfortable. I have a hat and scarf in Edwardian, which is a steel grey, and I love them. Homespun comes in a number of lovely colors, many of which are variegated and yield pleasant, cloudy swirls of color.

As they say, however, there are exceptions to every rule. I don’t particularly like the Metropolis color, which was originally purchased for a sweater for my Hubby. I didn’t think it was a color he would like, but he picked it, and by the time I was mostly done with the back, he agreed that he didn’t like it. Thankfully, he requested I not finish the sweater. Now, I have skeins and skeins of the stuff and am trying to figure out what to do with it all. So far, I’ve made a couple of crocheted coasters for his desk, and a small square liner for a mesh CD box. He’s also asked me to make a matching dust rag, which is the project that brings me to this blog entry: I hate it. Ok, It's not that I hate it, it's that I don’t like knitting it, I don't like looking at it (which is required when one is knitting), I don’t like the color, I don’t like anything about it, and I can’t seem to finish the thing because I just don’t want to do it. Fortunately, I am about 80% done with it, so there is light at the end of the Metropolis Dust Rag tunnel. Below is a scan of the thing, or at least a small portion of it:

There’s no need to adjust your screen: it really looks like a big black and grey field of rubble, and while this is only a small cropped section of the original image, there’s nothing to be missed in the remainder. It’s knit in seed stitch, but I suspect that if it were done in cable stitch, eyelet stitch or even macramé it would look exactly the same.

If it were a bit more interesting, one might think one were looking at a small part of the Greyed Rainbow [Jackson Pollock, 1953, currently located at the The Art Institute of Chicago®]. The dust rag is not interesting, however, and that could very well be my problem with it. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t mind making useful items like kitchen rags or dust rags, I love making things by request, and I like the color grey just fine. This, however, is not a good kind of grey, nor a true grey at all. It’s a mottled black and white, and the white is made a dirty-looking grey by the black fibres that, by virtue of the style of yarn, overlap the white fibres. It yields neither a mist grey nor an other-worldly grey, just an ugly, dirty grey. Yuck. I can’t wait until I finish the thing, and yet I have trouble bringing myself to work on it, thus my fairly quick progress on the gloves for my oldest:

Nonetheless, I still have to finish the scurvy dust rag of doom. Oh well: the knit must go on.