the never ending project

And I mean never ending in the best possible way. One of the women in my knitting group has been working on a sock yarn blanket for a few years. It's basically a time capsule - it's little squares of bits of yarn from every pair of socks she's ever made. I believe she's a 30+ year knitter, prolific at socks to boot! There's something about projects like that, that are a piece of your life, your history, that I just love. Like the quilts made from baby clothes, or concert t-shirts, or denim scraps. (A lot of those are on my lifetime project wish list too.)

Here is the original project. Cool, right?

I favorited the project on Ravelry about three months ago, but I've been thinking about it for longer than that. It looks like the original was made with an end in mind, and the knitter solicited yarn donations to make that happen. That's kind of cool too, the community contribution. But for me, the project will be personal. It's the kind of project that I'm not sure will ever end. I don't plan to buy or acquire anything specifically for this project. I want it to grow organically from yarn I've already used, or plan to soon. Just a little piece to keep, as so much of my knitting doesn't end up staying with me. So the other night, with yarn leftover from my toddler socks, I started a square.

Each one only seems to take an hour or so. It's pretty mindless, and will probably go quicker now that I've memorized the simple pattern. Once you have two squares, you start joining them together.

The blue yarn is for some preemie hats that I intend to knit. I have for some time, but I haven't been able to get myself into a baby knitting place recently. I wish it had done a color transition in the square, but it didn't. I'll have to add another one when I've made a few hats. As you can see based on the scale of my (slightly overexposed, slightly actually that pale) legs, this is going to take awhile. And that's cool with me. I don't have a plan for it at all. I plan to let it grow sort of amoeba-like, in whatever direction. I plan to leave it out once it gets large enough, to actually be used while under construction. I'll just knit a square now and then when the mood or the materials strike. This one is going to be around for a long while - I'll post an update in a few months and see where it's at!