Newly almost-finished UFO

In spite of my resolution to post more consistently on Sundays, I simply had to wait until today so I could get some better pictures of a newly almost-finished UFO project. It's now being blocked, and just has a little finishing left to be done, so as far as I'm concerned it's done.

In my post on April 29 I mentioned a Kaffe Fassett-like vest project I was thinking about. I actually got most of the back done before it began to languish in a most serious manner.

Now, UFOs are not usually a big problem for me - there aren't piles of them lurking in dark corners around the house and studio. Usually, if I don't finish something in a fairly reasonable length of time it's because there is a good reason - I don't really like the pattern I am knitting, or I don't like the yarn, or I made a bad decision in combining pattern and yarn. The trick is to realize why a project has become a UFO - once I figure that out the project usually gets unraveled and returned to the stash rather than becoming a fixture in my life.

Recently, after pulling the vest out and mulling it over on several occasions I finally realized that I wouldn't ever wear a vest that was as heavy and , well, woolly as this one was going to be. I realized it wanted to be a pillow much more than it wanted to be a vest, so I unraveled the beginning end and the slight amount of shaping that I had done, put the newly-live stitches on a separate needle, and got started again a week or so ago. And at long last I have the knitting done for the body of the pillow.

The pillow is knit in a single long strip beginning with the original vest back in the middle, which will become the pillow front. In the photo it's the center section with the broadest stripes, which were knit in an ikat-like pattern adapted from Kaffe Fassett's book of charted knitting patterns. the ends of the strip will become an envelope-style back for the pillow - it will have a flap at the top that will button closed over the lower end. The patterns for the back sections were invented ones of my own, but all the way through I drew off of Kaffe's approach - changing colours often, and not necessarily just at the beginning of a row.

Almost all of the yarns are handspun- mostly my own, with a few from friends. The browns, greys and whites are primarily test samples that were spun as part of my Sheep to Shawl team's practice sessions with various fleece types and preparations. I always love knitting on projects that I rely only on what I have on hand, and that use up lots and lots of little bits and pieces that are too much to throw out but not enough to do much with on their own. Once the blocking is done I'll sew up the sides and add some sort of border or i-cord piping, and then it will be a completely done UFO!