An Abandoned Project: Sky Pompoms

So, last summer I decided to "Pompom the Sky", making a pompom a day for a year to represent that day's weather.

 

It was going to be a fun pompom version of my sky blanket (which I'd hugely enjoyed making) but this time the pompoms were going to become a pompom sky rug or a couple of puffy fluffy sky cushions - I was going to see how the pompoms looked and how much space they took up en masse and then decide their final purpose.

I bought some yarn, looked at the sky each day at midday and wrote down my chosen sky colours then started making the pompoms in batches. I made pompoms for the whole of June...

 

... tagging each pompom with the date so I could arrange them in date order later on.

My pompom making continued in July...

 

... but then, it stopped.

I ran out of yarn (I'd not ordered much to start the project as I'd ended up with lots left over from my sky blanket and wanted to buy my supplies bit by bit this time round) and then I just didn't get round to ordering some more. Days and weeks and months went by and I kept looking at the sky and writing down the sky colours but not buying more yarn and not making any more pompoms. I didn't even trim the stray yarn from the July pompoms to make them nice and neat and fluffy.

Right up until the six month mark I kept telling myself "I'll order some yarn and catch up soon!" but it never happened. When 2015 rolled round I thought seriously about whether I'm actually ever going to finish this project and realised that no, I'm not.

I loved the idea of the sky pompoms! They look fantastic and I loved how using six strands of yarn per pompom allowed for more variations in colours than the two strands used to knit my sky blanket squares.

But while the blanket grew bit by bit as I knitted each square and added to the blanket, all that was growing this time was a big pile of pompoms as I wasn't going to start attaching them to anything until much later. This was much less satisfying - all the effort of an ongoing project without any of the excitement of seeing your work progress.

And (most crucially) although I loved the idea of the pompoms I wasn't actually that excited about owning a big fluffy pompom-covered rug or cushion. Like, it would look cool and would be fun to blog about but would just be a "thing" taking up space (unlike a nice, cuddly useful blanket) (all the decluttering I was doing last year may have influenced me here!!). And did I really want to spend all this time and effort and money making something that I wasn't sure I wanted to own?

So, I stopped looking at the sky each day and (finally) crossed "order yarn for sky pompoms!" off my To Do list.

It's taken me a couple of months to work up to admitting this!

Some of you may have guessed that I'd stopped making the sky pompoms simply because I hadn't blogged about them in aaaaages. And, of course, there is nothing wrong with starting a project and deciding it's not for you! But it still feels a bit embarassing to have announced this big fun project and then to have let it fizzle out like this. It's better that than continue throwing time and money at something that my heart's not really in though, right?

I'm going to finish up those July pompoms and try and find a use for them (as part of my Use it Or Lose It crafty decluttering plan) and I'll take some photos of all the pompoms together because they do look very cool all en masse ... and then stop feeling bad about this and start making something new.