The FOlio: Fox Paws

In the FOlio, I reflect on a finished knitting object and what the process of knitting it taught me.

Pattern : Fox Paws by Xandy Peters
Yarn : MollyGirl Unplugged Lite (Bat Out of Hell), Knit Picks Palette (Cornmeal, Coriander Heather, Marine Heather, Mulberry)
Knitted from : August 2021 to January 2022

Lesson:  When to frog and start over

I have a beautiful vintage purple dress coat, bought from an Etsy seller years ago. It is the coat I wear to make cold weather bearable; I love it so much that I’m almost sad when it is too warm to continue wearing it. And yet, I owned it for almost a decade without ever quite finding the right scarf for it. The shade, of course, made finding the right color tricky. Also its neckline is pretty snug and doesn't have a lot of space for bulk when it is completely buttoned up. For years I wore a plain black store bought flannel scarf; after I met and moved in with my now husband, I "borrowed" a thin pale blue knit scarf that matched the lining and blue tweed notes in the coat fabric. Later I knit a gorgeous rainbow scarf out of Knitted Wit's Autumn Rainbow colorway in a super bulky yarn that was shorter than a normal scarf. This succeeded in avoiding a lot of uncomfortable bulk when the coat was buttoned all the way up, but resulted in some awkward proportions and the ends constantly trying to escape over my shoulder if I wanted to leave a button or two open.

Yes I hear the cowl aficionados asking why I didn't try a cowl instead. I tend to struggle with cowls; I have a lot of fine hair that gets extremely static prone in the dry winter air - having to pull wool over my head multiple times a day makes me look like Einstein.

And then, mid 2021 when I was bored with my knitting and looking for a new kind of challenge, MollyGirl Yarn offered a Fox Paws 10th anniversary kit. One of the color options seemed designed to shock me out of my rut: Bat Out of Hell (dark gray), Little Black Dress (black), Alive for the First Time (hot pink), Dancing Queen (bright purple), and Love Me Tender (light gray). It was not my usual color choices; the pattern looked challenging but not too challenging and it might, finally, be the scarf I wanted for my purple coat. I placed an order, and as soon as it arrived, I got to work.

It wasn't long before my knitting gut started to feel a little queasy, but initially I put it down to my struggles with the pattern. If you have not knit Fox Paws (or any Xandy Peters pattern), that amazing embroidery /tapestry like effect is achieved through increases and decreases - sometimes as many as 5 decreases at a time or the creation of 13 stitches from one. It is definitely a pattern where you should insert a stitch marker at the end of every pattern repeat and count back to make sure you are staying on target. In the early going I ripped out the first dozen rows twice before I found a way to keep my counts correct and also adjust within the pattern if I myself off so I didn't have to keep ripping back. (Basically if I got to a repeat marker and realized I had 1-2 stitches too many or too few I would tweak within the last couple of K2tog in the repeat - either K3 tg if I had too many or not doing a Dec if I had too few. The pattern was far too busy for this adjustment to show and by tweaking within the repeat I avoided having a large chunk of the row get off which would have been noticeable.) But once I got that down, everything seemed to be going great except for one thing....

I hated the colors.

For starters, the purple was not really the right purple to match my coat; it was more of a blue-purple than a red-purple (I told myself it was complementary enough that it looked fine). Then the black yarn skein I received just wasn't reading as different enough from the dark gray skein due to the high amount of dark gray variagation in it, so I wasn't getting the full five color effect. And the neon pink took over the entire design, to the point that all I saw when I looked at it was that color. (I will note that the yarn itself is gorgeous and I don't know how MollyGirl dyes those bright colors so well - but it turns out neon pink is something I like as a very limited accent color.)

And there was one other problem.... I had misread a key part of the pattern repeat. After you finish the full set of rows that make one "fox paw" row, you are supposed to work a few rows in stockinette. This helps give the scarf a little more length and stretches your yarn yardage. I completely skipped over that part in reading the pattern and only noticed when I realized I was about halfway done with each ball of yarn but had done only a quarter of the repeats called for in the pattern.  The fabric was really cool looking, but my knitting gut sunk further every time I looked at it.

I should note here that I almost never frog projects. I'm very much a sunk costs person who feels like if I just power through and finish, I can find some use for the end product, even if it isn't quite what I want. But telling myself "oh if I hate it I will just give it to my niece" wasn't working. I wanted a Fox Paws for myself, badly, I just didn't want THIS Fox Paws.

I ended up putting it aside to go on a family vacation. While visiting Seattle, I found a stall for MJ Yarns at Pike Place Market and purchased some beautiful yarn with a purple far closer to the purple of my coat. In fact this yarn (American Worsted in Berry Pie) was cream with speckles of purple and Teal. I wanted to make mitts for my purple coat, and I started to think I could use the colors in the yarn as inspiration for a new palette for my Fox Paws.

Initially my plan was to swap the pink for Teal, the blue-purple for a red-purple and the dark gray for a cream (to get better contrast with the black). But now the cream and the light gray had too little contrast and it also just felt like the palette was missing something to really punch it up. And then in a flash of inspiration, I looked at a pair of in progress color work mittens that I was doing in shades of yellow and brown and presto...

I love this scarf so much. My biggest lesson here is - it's okay to frog! This project ended up being a perfect storm of reasons to frog:
-I didn't love the colors
-I messed up the pattern in a way that would have resulted in a very short scarf
-I really liked the pattern and wanted a finished version I actually would wear

Any of these alone would be reason enough to frog a project. Altogether it is a sign of my stubbornness that it took me as long as it did to start over.

Do you have a project that is making your knitting gut queasy? Have you knit Fox Paws, and what did you think? Let me know below.