Sipalu Inspiration

Day Two: An Inspirational Pattern

Before they were discontinued I purchased a kit for the Sipalu Bag from KnitPicks.  It was just so beautiful with so many shades of colors that I couldn't resist.  Of course I'd only been knitting a little over 6 months at the time and I had other projects in mind first.  Now it's been a little over a year and I haven't found time to start my Sipalu yet, but I'm still looking forward to it.  

I'm sure my overall knitting has improved since I started, but I still don't have a lot of experience with colorwork.  I prefer to control my yarn tension by keeping my working yarn wrapped around my right index finger, but for colorwork I've been knitting with one color in each hand.  I've made it through a couple of small projects that way, but I still haven't found a reliable way to keep the yarn tensioned in my clumsy left hand.  And although I've figured it out enough for projects worked in the round, I'm not sure I could purl very well with the clumsy left hand yet either.

My latest colorwork attempt, with some tension problems

I suspect I should really practice some continental knitting and get better at it before tackling the Sipalu project, but we'll see if I get impatient and take a stab at it with my semi-clumsy style instead.  Of course now that my yarn stash has grown and I have more project ideas than time to knit them, it's a project that's probably still a ways off anyway.