Step Away From the Knitting
I haven't done any blogging, or knitting -- or much of anything, for that matter -- for the past week. I contracted the Plague in the middle of last week, so have been mostly sleeping, drinking tea, and meditating on the texture and properties of the living room wall. It's amazing how quickly you can start feeling sorry for yourself when you have nothing to occupy your mind.
In my case, satisfying occupation of my mind goes with satisfying occupation of my hands, i.e., knitting. I can knit serenely away for hours, without TV or music or company. I come up with some of my best ideas at these times. Conversely, when I'm not knitting, and not doing anything else either, my mind finds bad places to go, into the deep, dark, moth-infested, tangle-skeined, Dazzle-Aire-remnanted, drop-stitched knitting basket of the soul. (You might call it the hand-basket of the soul, and you know where you go in one of those!)
So it's best, I find, to have knitting handy at all times. Even if I'm probably not going to be able to knit. I think if I were the type of person who wanted to go skydiving (I'm not), I'd insist on bringing at least a sock-in-progress.
Still, I've learned that there are times when one has to say to oneself: "STEP AWAY FROM THE KNITTING!" When knitting a complicated lace piece, I have a two-tink rule: if I have to un-knit more than one row, I need to force myself to put the knitting away until another day. Studies (in my living room) have shown that after tinking two rows of lace, any further knitting on that piece within that calendar day will result in a very tenacious hex descending over it, which is likely to end with multiple-row ripping and all sorts of juicy swear words.
Yesterday I started an easy project to work my way back into knitting after my illness. Since I've been knitting a two-color Brioche-stitch scarf for a friend, and since I had agreed to contribute some items to a charity project, I thought it would be easiest for me mentally to just start another Brioche. That way I'd only have to keep track of one pattern. Things went well for the first six inches of knitting (don't get impressed by my inchage; it's loosely knit in worsted-weight yarns on bigger needles) but then I started to go a bit stupid in the head. Am I on the dark side of the work? The light side? Wait -- I just knitted with the black, I should be knitting with the Silk Garden. Or should I --? I found myself dropping yarn-overs, tinking back every second or third row, looking back at the pattern, the yarn, my hands, turning the work this way and that ... And all this on a pattern I could do in my sleep with both hands and one eye tied behind my back a few days earlier. When, for about the eighth time, I looked at my work and saw wrong-color strands going across the flow of the pattern stitch, I stuffed the whole thing in my knitting bag for the day and went to bed.
I think I'm just going to Step Away From the Knitting for today, too. I'm going to be working all day at the store, and that will be sufficient to keep my mind out of the handbasket. I'm sure the Brioche won't get stale by tomorrow.
