I have mentioned (from time to time), that I am incapable of sitting still.
Moving fingers prevent me from having to bounce a foot. A moving foot while I read allows me to keep my hands still for a bit.
Awake, I find myself randomly walking down the hall in the middle of work without any conscious awareness that I needed to move. I just did, so my right brain took over, got me up, and marched me down the hall to the living room.
It figures once I’m there, I’ll do push-ups to quiet down the fidgets for a bit so I can get back to writing. I had a hell of a time sitting still in school. And I am, even at the age of fifty-seven, a remarkably squirmy human being.
So, in order to keep my hands moving and the rest of me still, I have developed a couple of quiet down-time obsessions. I play video games.
And I knit. Generally only for a few hours a night, but I’m pretty quick, and even though I don’t use patterns (and do a lot of ripping back to change designs as I think of something I’ll like better), I still get a lot done.
So here are some pictures of my most recently completed project, and some things that are currently in progress.
One of these days I’ll show you some of the things I finished and kept.
I still had some sleeve ends to sew in after I finished steaming the finished sweater (after ripping back and redesigning the front once, the collar half a dozen times, and the sleeves eleven times.
Sometimes it takes me a long time to get a design right.
And the following are part of a new sweater I’m putting together.
Again, there is no pattern for this. I simply look at what I’m doing and decide to change colors when I see something I like. A fair amount of ripping back goes into this, too.
The technique that makes the curves is working in short rows. For this sweater I’m using the loop and turn method.
Yarn, incidentally, is Noro Silk Garden Light. Devilishly expensive, but I love it. So relatives got me gift cards for my birthday back in October, and I bought two different colorways with it, and am making one sweater from each.
Sweaters start as the idea of what I think I want to make. And they get a first draft, and a revision.
Like my fiction. And I do a LOT of story development and plotting while I knit. The process of knitting is pretty amazing for allowing your to connect story ideas into a threaded narrative.
Maybe that’s why stories are called yarns.
Thanks for this post. It makes me feel more normal. I crochet, take it apart, crochet some more, take it apart. I do that with writing too. In fact, I tend to do things in fits and spurts. I am not a “sit at your desk every day at 9” type, other than my day job. I arrive on time, that’s about it.
At a previous job, a co-worker wrote down the times he saw me get up and walk around. Turns out, I got up and walked around every 45 minutes, almost to the minute. I don’t know if I am still so regular about moving around, but thought it was interesting.
Interestingly,I started knitting to stop playing Candy Crush Saga. My knitting was terrible so I progressed to crochet. Creating from yarn inspired me to recommence playing my cello which led me to wanting to write, for a living. Which is quite something.
I don’t really knit (I’ll dabble in a bit of crochet now and again), but I love how your process for knitting mirrors your writing process. And those sweaters you’re working on are works of art!