restarting old project...

 I was kind of bored with the vest and the plain socks, and didn't have the energy to wind off yarn for the hats I want to start, so I pulled out a scarf I had worked on for a while but tucked away in a knitting bag (I have MANY knitting bags. One problem is I tuck stuff away and I am very much an out-of-sight, out-of-mind person, and I forget about them.

Anyway, this is Catherine Wingate's "Ruggles Reversible Scarf #1," a pattern I think that's been on the internet for 30 years or more various places (I remember it first from the old Woolworks site, which I think now may be gone? maybe even from the Archive? But it's still findable on Ravelry....)

I added a few more rows. Right now it's a little frustrating because the color shifting yarn isn't; it's stuck in that lavender and tan combo....

 Heh. Trongles. It's a knit-purl pattern that makes triangles or pennant shapes - here I know it looks like it's curved but I have it turned a little funny in the photo.

I don't know about the scarf. Oh, I will finish it, but the whole color-shifting thing is a little weird and maybe a little ugly - not the best combination of colors (The yarn is Lion Brand Mandala, the colorway is named "white elephant," which, yeah, I guess? It came from dear departed JoAnn's, bought it a bunch of years back, maybe even before the pandemic?)

And I don't know. I don't know if anyone else has a weird memory like me but sometimes I will see something I know dates to the before-times (I can often remember when and where I bought yarn, or certain books, or stuffed animals), and I'll feel a little pang for that vanished world - a time when I trusted more, when the world felt like a more generally-friendly, or at least less-hostile place, where my sense of security about things had not been shaken yet. 

I was happier then, I think. Or maybe I only remember the happier times. 

But I do like knitting on the "old" patterns, the ones I knew even way back when I was first knitting again, back around 1997. It was a time when things seemed more exciting and more possible (It does feel to me, with all the consolidations of late, and the closures, like the knitting world is constricting, and like many things, may soon be dictated by a very few oligopolies - except of course there are always the indie dyers, and as long as they can get the base yarns, we may have a supply of "small" sources. Or if the shipping-from-overseas ever resolves, there are places like West Yorkshire Spinners and some of the Scandinavian yarn manufacturers, even if the whole US network of distributors/manufacturers collapses. Or maybe I learn to spin.....and in If You Give A Mouse A Cookie fashion, if I learn to spin, then I need to learn to dye., And if I learn to dye, then I need to get sheep or alpacas.....)

But at least for now - I do have a lot of yarn. And I have books of patterns and patterns I've printed off, even if online were to somehow become unavailable. 

But it does make me nostalgic to look back at the patterns I remember seeing - even if I didn't yet feel comfortable with knitting something like that (even knit-purl patterns seemed complex when I first came back to knitting).