I just finished this.

It is a design called Skrupsak by Signe Stromgaard. It fits perfectly and Our Dear Boy thinks it is pretty good. And yet, I have to admit this was a very joyless knit for me.

It wasn’t boring. I decided to just use the design as a picture reference and worked up my own stitch counts to my gauge. The pattern calls for a fingering weight and I knit mine in a sportsweight. I had to rip back from the shoulders because I forgot that garter stitch is wider than stockinette and had to change the amount and rate of decreases for the armholes. It is such a clever, simple design. The 1 x 1 stripes just fly as they are knit in the round for the body. The garter stripes beginning at the point when you knit back and forth for the armholes, mean that the yarn is carried invisibly at the sides. The solid colour at the shoulders means that any slight differences in rows when you work the reverse shoulder shapings, are invisible.

The yarn didn’t sing to me but I was using up stash as part of Summer of the Single Skein KAL, so that felt worthy and useful. The yarn is from deep stash, possibly decade old 5ply Classic by Bendigo Woollen Mills, machine washable, chain plyed, millspun Australian wool.

It wasn’t a millstone. It seemed to get knitted pretty effortlessly over a month in odd moments of waiting, car trips and some evenings.

So why it was joyless, I cannot tell. Normally knitting is such a source of pleasure and solace for me. It is very curious. Perhaps, despite all my intellectual understandings of what makes a stimulating project, it just underwhelmed me. Or perhaps, like those Guatemalan Worry Dolls, it absorbed all the miscellaneous ambivalence from the rest of my life.

What ever it was, I trust it will pass as I just cast on a version for Our Dear Girl!