I think my mojo may be returning

I have been in a craft funk for a couple weeks. I couldn't match patterns to yarn, I'd start projects and decide they were ugly, and I decided I hated most of the yarn in my stash. It was not a good headspace to be in this week.

Sometimes when this happens, it's all in my head. There's nothing objectively wrong with my projects, I just hate them because of Reasons. But I'm pretty sure that wasn't the case this time. Case in point: my attempt to use some of my souvenir yarn from Alaska.

I have 400-ish yards of single-ply fingering weight wool/silk blend from Bad Sheep Yarn in North Pole, AK. It's Peregrine, which looks somewhat like the skein in this listing for the same colorway on another yarn base:

I brought it in to the store, found a yarn that coordinated with it, and decided I wanted to make The Love of Spiders shawl by Melanie Berg:

So I wound my yarn and got started. It's a basic triangle shawl shape and the slipped stitches make things a tad fiddly, so I was willing to write off my discontent with the way it was working out for at least a few inches. 

I got it to the end of a pattern repeat, then showed it to knitting friends. "It's not BAD," was the nicest thing anyone had to say about it. "It just looks like the slipped stitches are all messed up," my boss told me."

Ouch. (They weren't messed up; the yarn just wasn't playing nicely with the pattern.). I would insert a photo here, but apparently it was so ugly that I only showed it off in person.

So I pulled it out and found a different pattern, one with no slipped stitches and fewer fiddly bits in general. Bigger chunks of color, in recognizable lines, which should have helped minimize the "It looks like you messed it up" aspect of things. I got started, let it go for a couple inches, and while it looked better, I still looked at it and thought, "Meh...." Like, it made the yarn ugly, when it really isn't.

Everyone told me how much better it looked, which still didn't mean I liked it. Last night in a fit of pique I ripped the whole thing out and started a third project. "If it keeps refusing to be a shawl, fine. Screw shawls. I'm just going to make a striped cowl and be done with it."

See that? That right there is what the yarn wanted to be. Good thing, too, because my next option was going to involve a flamethrower and a lot of hysterical cackling.

I was so emboldened by the return of my mojo, today I scrapped another project I was hating on, and I used the yarn to cast on for another shawl entirely. And now that I am 2 hours into the project, I'm pretty confident this one's going to work out, too.

Now I just have to finish an ugly mohair cowl (there's no way it will ever be ugly enough for me to willingly rip back mohair) and decide whether my current sock project is too awful to live, and the funk will be entirely past. Just in time, too, since I'm going to have a LOT of knitting time pretty soon ...