The Knitting Police are after me again.
The Knitting Police enforce the Knitting Laws, the most important of which apparently is:
Finish What You Start.
I’m an anarchist from way back, maybe because I came of age during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it was almost illegal to follow rules. If you say anything to me which contains the word “should”, I have an immediate, visceral reaction which makes me do the opposite of what I “should”.
I shouldn’t have “too much” yarn, whatever that means. (How can you have too much yarn? That’s like having too much air, or too much time.) I have a wide-ranging collection of yarns, both vintage and modern, much of which is parked in the overflow parking, a.k.a. my not-so-mini-storage unit.
I shouldn’t start a project when I have other, unfinished projects. Need I say more?
I should complete knitted gifts before the gift-giving-occasion (GGO), or at least within 6 months after said GGO. Or at the very least while it still fits the recipient. Ahem.
Guilty as charged, Your Honor.
I’m trying to do better, though. Last fall, I decided to knit and felt some clogs for a charity sale. I finished the knitting and felting a full week before the deadline.
This Christmas, I decided a week before the holiday to knit and felt three pairs of clogs, and knit two neck gaiters. And I would have finished them all in time, if the last pair of clogs hadn’t gone mysteriously kitty-wampus on me, causing me to re-knit the last clog on Christmas morning. At least I was able to present the gift in a lovely gift bag, even though the needles were still in it.
Next I offered to knit a kimono for a friend, a dead-easy collection of acres of stockinette-and-garter rectangles. Pure idiot-knitting as long as you have, say, 8 hours a day to sit and watch TV with your hands on auto-knit. I’m almost done with it, and I have barely knit a stitch on anything else while I’ve been working on it.
I was thinking the other day that it’s time to knit one of the – um – several projects I’ve bought yarn for recently, and was getting excited at the prospect, when I realized I have yarn to knit 3 sweaters for the baby my close friend is having next month.
So don’t tell the Knitting Police I’m not going to sew together my own kimono from last year, or finish the applied I-cord on the wrap I knit the year before that, or seam the Alice Starmore gansey I knit the year before that, or …
Uh-oh, flashing lights in my rearview mirror. I’m outta here.
