I’ve written about it before: my love of starting projects, and how many of them never get finished. It ended up getting so bad at one point that I had a pile of projects stashed into a corner, which I eventually ended up calling the “corner of shame”. Heck, when I moved, I even labeled all the boxes containing those various unfinished projects as Corner of Shame boxes, so I’d know exactly what they contained. Most of them hadn’t been touched since I’d moved out of Rana’s, just shuffled from one location to the next all tucked away in their project bags.
Well, now that I’m doing better and have come out of my grief fog, I’ve been able to tackle unpacking my craft supplies – including some of the contents of the Corner of Shame. And in two cases so far, I’ve actually taken things out of the Corner of Shame and finished them up.
An easy win: wrapping up the Campfire Cozy shawl
The first project to escape the Corner of Shame is one I feel really silly about, the Campfire Cozy shawl. If I remember right, I made this at the end of summer in 2020. When I pulled it out of its bag, I found that not only was it actually done, it only had two ends left to weave in before blocking. Oof.
So I wove those babies in, and set it out to block last Tuesday morning before work.
Excuse the mess – I’m still working on reorganizing my office to actually include a proper crafting area.
It took just about all day to dry (note to self: blocking things in the office will mean you’re smelling wet wool all day), but it was worth it to finally take something out of the Corner of Shame and finish it up. Now I just have to wait for cooler weather to get here so I can enjoy it!
A bigger project: the Aurora Queen crochet-a-long blanket
The next project I tackled was the Queen crochet-a-long blanket. I originally started a simple version of this blanket in the Oceania colorway after finishing the Campfire Cozy shawl. After seeing a knitting project that used colors inspired by the aurora borealis, I bought some yarn in similar colors and started a newer, bigger Queen in October 2020. I made it about 2/3rds of the way through the blanket before getting distracted with life at some point in early 2021, when the poor blanket ended up being stuffed into its basket and left to sit for a while.
I think I only added 12 more rows after taking this picture in January of last year – then the poor blanket sat in the corner for a while.
I dug out the blanket again after finishing the granny square rug you see in the picture of the Campfire Cozy on the blocking mats. After seeing how close I was to the end of the pattern, I was determined to finish it – and after about a month or so of working on it, I finished it last Tuesday night!
It’s so pretty and so big!
It really is lovely, and the colors worked out so well together. I actually hadn’t been able to get a good look at the blanket as it progressed, since my old room didn’t have much space in it to spread out the Queen. Seeing it all finished is amazing, though – a lot of work went into the blanket, and it makes me so happy to see it done.
Revisiting an old friend: the Hue Shift afghan
Now that I’ve finished the Queen, I feel like I’m kind of on a roll here – so I dug out an older resident of the corner of shame: the Hue Shift afghan. It’s been languishing in its project bag for quite a while, as I think the last time I worked on it was sometime in 2019. (I’ve actually written about this blanket a few times already.) While trying to hunt down another resident of the Corner of Shame, the Sailor Moon pixel quilt, I came across the Hue Shift and decided maybe I should take it out and work on it.
Since taking this photo, I’ve finished the third panel and started on the fourth!
This one’s also pretty close to being done – I can’t imagine it’ll take me more than a month or two to wrap this one up. I forgot about how quickly each individual square goes! I mentioned how quickly the squares knitted up during my first try at the Hue Shift with worsted weight yarn, and said “oh if I commit to knitting a square a day, it’ll probably end up taking me three years to finish it” – and, well, I wasn’t wrong. It’s been over three and a half years since I started the second try, haha.
More projects to finish, and rethinking the Corner of Shame
I’ve got a whiteboard up in my crafting area, with a list of some of the projects I want to work on wrapping up – if I get bored of one of the projects I’m working on, I can cycle through the list and try to get more things out of the Corner of Shame. (I would share a photo of it, but currently “finish organizing the craft area” is also on my list of unfinished projects – my craft desk is an embarrassing mess at the moment.) Finishing projects always gives me a happy little boost of energy, and makes me feel accomplished – and that’s a good feeling to have, especially with so many other things going on in my life right now
I need to find a better name for the Corner of Shame, I think. Something that’ll inspire me to take things out of there and finish them, instead of feeling bad about not finishing a project I’ve started. The only idea I have so far is the “hibernation station”, though. If anyone has any better ideas, let me know, okay?
Patterns linked in this post: