Memory Lane Monday

A few weeks back, I officially gave up my long abandoned Flickr account.  I checked everything I could, none of the pics on the account were important to me.  I went through, deleting them one at a time to chec, before I did the full account de-activation.  I had to click a whole bunch of ‘yes, this is what I really want’ and ‘yes, I understand that means losing the content connected to this account’ dialog boxes.  I knew what I was doing.

…or so I thought.  Turns out, somewhere, that I was not finding, I stored a whole lot of Ravelry pics.  All my early knitting, the pre-Ravelry stuff.  Last night, I discovered vast sections of my notebook with ‘photo no longer available’ icons displayed.  UGH!  Technology! What a hassle.  All those photos that were being slurped from Flickr are gone!

I knew I could recover a lot of the pictures though.  Once upon a time, I had actual photos of what I’d knit.  You know…pictures printed on paper!  I promptly started scouring my old emails for jpg attachments and of course, I got out the box of old photos.

It’s been a great stroll down memory lane, looking at all those things I knit years ago and thinking about all the people they were gifted too.  Each one has a unique story, I’m glad I had the forethought to archive them when I did.

All these hats!  I loved that squirrel — I used him several times.   Waldo & Wanda baby hats, when friends didn’t know the sex of their first born.  He turned out to be a Waldo and he was so cute in his little hat.

Celtic knots & swirls from a book of celtic charts I bought in Ireland.  I don’t have pictures of that vacation anymore.  They were lost to another digital snafu years ago but I’ve still got the book of celtic designs.  I want to revisit all of these hats!

Of course, as I searched, I also found some things that have not stood the test of time.  A hideous blue fringed poncho??  NO.  Some ponchos, maybe.  This poncho?  NO.  No idea where it is and I’m okay with that.

A pale blue hat with so much thick n thin weird ruffly shit going on, that you can’t even tell it’s got a stupid blue flower on it?  UGH.  no.  Again, no love lost because I don’t know where it is.

The good news is…we can learn from our earlier mistakes.  Like that cute attempt at a Pac-Man hat.  I was trying to ‘unvent’ intarsia in the round.  It’s horrible and puckered.  I could do much better today.  I’ve said since day 1, I wanted to re-do that hat.  I can definitely do much better today!  So many projects worthy of a second attempt.

And then, there’s this…a project I still have close at hand but never put on Ravelry at all.

A weird, boxy, boucle cotton tank top.  The second garment I ever knit for myself, probably about 2004.  I didn’t like it at the time but putting it on today, it’s comfy and it looks ok.   It’s mostly two squares sewn together, that’s why I picked it.  There’s a tiny bit of neck shaping, only a couple rows.   I’m still wearing now.  I’m gonna attempt a revival with it.

Not sure why I never put it on Ravelry but it’s there now.  It’s a significant milestone…my 1000th Ravelry notebook page!  My inner archivist is a little disappointed they don’t all have pictures anymore but at least I’ve picked up a few projects that fell through the cracks previously!  What would I do without Ravelry?!?  A Ravelry data loss is the stuff nightmares are made of.

1000 projects cataloged!  It’s a milestone worthy of a legacy garment like this one.  Needless to say, my first sweater was so bad there are no known pictures of it in existence and even the garment itself was destroyed, never to be seen again.

Now, I think I’ll celebrate by casting something on…

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