Antelope Canyon Poncho Knit-A-Long Sneak Peak

The answer is always “I need more yarn.”

I have been working on this pattern for quite some time and it is a doozy! It has been a monumental challenge for me to get this pattern down on paper. Along with many life events this year (retirement, wedding, moving into a rental home, grand baby, home building, a second up-coming move…), I was trying to squeeze in a pattern or two. I found that I could seek solace in the knitting part of the project, but sitting down to write the pattern and make the corresponding videos was a chore.

As my faithful readers may recall, I made the original poncho about two years ago and was waffling about writing a pattern. You can read all about that in this post:

Free Style Knitting–The Pahoehoe Wrap

Once I committed to making a pattern, I had to knit up a second piece using my desired yarn (Leading Men Fiber Arts, Diva) and a new color palette. I chose earth-tone oranges as a homage to my recent hiking excursion in Upper Antelope Canyon (a slot canyon in Northern Arizona). We visited in September 2021, and it was amazingly beautiful! The gallery below are some of the photos I took during our guided tour through https://adventurousantelopecanyon.com/. Our tour guide Irene was awesome!

My thinking was that while I was knitting the second piece, I would write the pattern, make the charts, and create the videos I needed. I thought that this would be straightforward since this piece is made in sections, aka modular knitting. I began writing the directions for each section, making the corresponding charts, and making the videos while working on the knitted piece.

But early on in Section 3, I decided to make some formatting changes to the charts and needed to edit the pattern for sections 1 and 2 a bit. Those decisions made all the videos obsolete. Ugh. Since I didn’t want that to happen again, I worked through the remaining sections of the pattern, charts, and completed the knitting without making any new videos.

I was paralyzed on this project for a long while after I realized that I would have to remake the videos–it was the one thing I could willfully ignore for awhile–but now I think I’m finally in a better place to forge ahead.

I now have a very rough draft of the pattern and (hopefully!) better charts, and aim to make the promised videos as I work through yet a third poncho. As I was telling a close knitting friend, “The answer is always more yarn.”

I’ve started poncho #3, and I have annotated the pattern draft where I need to insert the videos. [Note: it’s a little more challenging now as I don’t have a dedicated quiet space in the rental house. You might get to hear/see John as well as Lucie and Crash in these videos.] In the meantime, if you are interested in helping me work through the pattern, test knit, or joining in as a KAL, let me know in the comments. I’ll be running the test knit through this site (not Ravelry for now), simply because it is so much easier to add videos here rather than at Ravelry.

Photos of my completed Antelope Canyon Poncho are shown below.