I can hardly believe it

...but the Dragonfly Cowl (January yarn club) is finished!  Isn't it gorgeous!?!?

There are so many things I love about this cowl.  The colors are so pretty.  The yarn is sumptuous.  The pattern is complex (I love that now that it's finished).

As I've said earlier, I really enjoy some things about color work.  The finished product is something to behold and makes me very proud.  I love the look, too. It's beautiful and people are impressed with your hard work and concentration.  (let's be honest...part of why we knit it to impress people! :) )

All the love in the world for this cowl, however, will not ever encourage me to do another like it.  It is gorgeous...it is beautiful...I'm very proud of the finished result, but I seriously almost quit about 1/2 way through because I was so frustrated with the making of it.

I've been trying to think of why so that I don't make the same mistake of trying a pattern that I'm going to hate before long.  And to be honest, I think it was the interruption of the scales pattern to make the dragon flies...and of course, when the dragon flies were half finished I couldn't just make scales all the way across.  In the end it felt like a Herculean effort to get me through the pattern.

It definitely takes a special person to dive into this kind of colorwork.  I don't think I'm that kind of special.

All that said, I was actually looking at colorwork hats and thinking about whether I wanted to do another.  They are so warm...they look awesome on...

And then I smacked that little bit of insanity back in its place and told myself to CONCENTRATE on the lace hat I was making a mess of right then and there.  I really do fear that hat is about to be frogged to become a plain old vanilla pair of socks...I want the hat...it's super cute...but I'm really not enjoying the knitting of it.

But I've completed 20 rows of seed stitch over 162 stitches so that I could have that jaunty little bow over my ear...the question then becomes...do I think I can put in a life line after the fact and save the bow and just do a plain old hat???  It's something to think about.  (but then, the yarn is so dark...)   Because that's some gorgeous yarn right there and will be so pretty on my head with that cute little bow over my ear!  Maybe I should just plug on with the lace pattern...definitely worth trying out a few more rows, don't you think?

Yarn is from the Rockin' Sock Club September 2013.  I'm not using either pattern as I didn't like knitting the socks and the hat that was the pattern just isn't my thing.