When's It Time to Start Over? A Question for the Crafter and for Life

Any crafter knows, sometimes that wonderful idea you had in your head doesn’t work out exactly the way you envisioned it.  You can tell early on, too – those first few stitches, cuts of fabric, swashes of paint.  But maybe if you tweak it, maybe if you carry on, it’ll magically become what you imagined.  Or maybe it won’t, and you’ll have a disappointing mess.

Thus, you are faced with the question of whether to keep on going, because you’ve started and invested your time, materials, energy, or do you start all over again and accept the lost investment, but hopeful for the thing you actually wanted.

This may seem a deep philosophical question for the events that come up in your life. That college choice, your job, a relationship.  There’s many choices we make in life that seemed like a great idea when we started, but somewhere along those first few steps, we get clear signals that we were not going to be happy with the end results.

For today, however, this is a pretty basic question. Should I keep on with this poncho/shawl plan I had for this orange yarn, because it’s not looking as cute as I had originally thought it would or do I unravel it and start all over again on a new design, one that I may like better and actually wear more? Do I continue with the one that may be easier, the poncho, because it's my own design so I can be creative and no one can tell me that it's wrong, or with the one that may be a little harder because it's from a pattern, which by the way is written in Russian with a basic pattern chart.  Such is the question of the crocheter.

Poncho in progress - my own design 

The other option - a summer shawl

Since I have two skeins, I’m gong to start option number two (the shawl) and see whether I like that any better than the poncho.

Life isn’t always like that, you can’t always follow two parallel paths until one is the obvious choice.  Sometimes you have to make a definite choice and be ready to start over if you have to.  Or stick with your choice and make the best of it.  But back to my yarn…

I’m carrying it around with me and will work on a few more rows, then decide. Either way, I guess I’m going to have to unravel one or the other.

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