I’m in love…

Love, thy name is Genevieve. I think about her all the time: I can’t wait for my son to go to bed or my husband to leave for work so that I can spend time with her. When I’m with her, I often forget to eat. Sometimes I put off leaving her for the night so long that I’m literally falling alseep where I sit, and even then I can hardly sleep, because I can’t stop thinking of the things I want to do with her. I’ve even considered waiting until Greg falls asleep so that I can sneak out of bed and spend just a little more time with her.

Genevieve is a sweater, and she is mine.

It all started last Friday, when – no, that’s not true. It started more than a year ago. I had just gotten back into crocheting, improved some of my poor technique that made my finished pieces look amateurish, and I was riding the high of a new cable internet connection, scouring the web for new and interesting patterns to execute. (That was before I started designing.) I don’t remember how I got there, (I think it was actually a link from the CrochetMe forums) but all of a sudden, I was staring at this.

It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It was knitted, (someone had linked to White Lies Designs to say, ‘Why don’t we have patterns like this in crochet?’ Why, indeed…) and it was the kind of knitted design that makes your throat close and your eyes blur as you go blind with a mad, mad case of knitting envy. I couldn’t get it out of my head.

I blame Angelina (that’s her name, the name of that sweater) for making me so willing to let Greg’s grandmother teach me to knit that Christmas. Then of course I got distracted by other things, but I never really forgot her, lurking in the back of my mind, just waiting for a chance to spring up and consume me.

Her chance came last week, after the sucess of the Green Man Sweater. If you can create that, she whispered, you can create me. Give me liiiiiiiife…. Of course, my ability to design a baby sweater does not in any way imply (to me) that I’d be capable of creating something like Angelina, but I swear, that’s what she said to me.

I toyed around a bit, looking for ideas on how she might be accomplished, and I found a few. Just enough that I started to believe her. Maybe I could do it, after all. The final blow came when I found the perfect name for her. Genevieve. It means ‘white wave,’ and has all of the feminine, romantic connotations that I could hope for. It fit perfectly.

Once I had a name for her, and a plan of attack, I don’t see how I could help it, I really don’t. An innocent grocery-shopping trip on Friday somehow led me past Michael’s (which, strangely enough, is in the opposite direction from the grocery store…weird…) where I petted the wool-ease (my chosen medium) and somehow ended up with five skeins at checkout. I would have bought more, too, but they only had five skeins in fisherman. I’ll probably be back there sometime this week. 😮

Then, using Super Saver and a dc/ch mesh pattern, I made a mock-up of the sweater, something else I’ve never done before, and the results were good enough for me to start the real work yesterday. I’m so excited, I can’t wait to show her to you. I don’t know how much Genevieve will end up looking like Angelina, but you can bet that she’ll be just as beautiful in her own way.

I guess we’ll see.