I’m sure I’m not the only knitter out there who occasionally suffers from knitting ADD. My attempts to distract myself from a few unpleasant aspects of life have resulted in a bit of being overwhelmed. I’m listing everything out here so I can “see” it better than when projects are scattered around my house or in my bag, and hopefully knuckle down and finish things.
I’ve got two pairs of socks on the needles. The first pair has been on the needles since January.
They’re not finished because I wanted to knit them as long as I could until I ran out of yarn. I was thinking knee highs. Except the distance from my heel to my knee is stupidly long. Apparently I momentarily forgot that I’m tall. I have other knee highs in my queue, but I think they’ll be more interesting to knit, because they’re patterned. These are plain old stockinette and kind of boring. One of them is almost to my knee, but I had to stop knitting them two at a time because they were getting too heavy and obnoxious. This is a problem I frequently have with knitting socks two at a time, and why I generally don’t do it.
I started knitting this sock last Saturday (I cast on a few hours early for the Apothecary Yarns KAL).
They’re Cusp by Cookie A, and I’m a dumbass who didn’t check the charts as frequently as I should have, so it’s a little messed up in small sections but I don’t care. I finished the charts on the first sock Thursday evening, and am just working on the rest of the foot! I hope to finish it today, but I need to work on deep cleaning my apartment.
I’ve been working on this scarf for a few weeks now, and I’m pretty close to finishing it. It’s been my travel project, mostly staying in my purse. I picked this stitch pattern out of a Barbara Walker book, as I wanted something that would not obscure the beautiful colors in this lovely skein of Handmaiden Sea Silk that was gifted to me by Maria for my birthday.
And while three projects on the needles may not seem like a lot, there’s this to consider: I’ve had to prevent myself from winding yarn and casting on for a baby cardigan that I’m going to sort of make up as I go along, because I couldn’t find any worsted-weight baby patterns that I loved and was willing to pay for—not that I don’t think they’re worth the money, but they were the same price as a pattern for an adult sweater and something about that just didn’t sit right with me for some reason. This is also why I will only buy baby clothes on sale for friends’ babies—paying so much money for something the kid is going to grow out of in a relatively teeny amount of time is ridiculous, in my opinion. I also “need” to knit a Basil the Brontosaurus (as seen in yesterday’s Friday Finds). And I want to get some sewing projects under my belt. And I have some crewel work projects passed down to me from my mom that I want to do (because who doesn’t need kitschy 70s-esque crewel work on their walls?!). And one of the bonus challenges for the Yarn Snobs Stash Out Challenge is colorwork projects, and I only have the yarn and pattern for Oh Deer, Selbu Modern, Chrysanthemms, and Pod of Cetaceans, not to mention the 170+ other patterns in my queue that are ready to go—they just need me to knit them.
I need to focus and try to maintain a one- or two-project at a time momentum and not get bogged down trying to distract myself too much. Are you a more monogamous knitter? How do you stay focused when life starts going crazy?
I only have one project on the kneedles at a time, or things get neglected and kids grow out of sweaters before I finish knitting them!
When life gets crazy, I knit less and focus on what needs to be done to sort out the insanity. Then, when the pace returns to normal, I have to force myself to finish whatever project got sidelined before I move on to the next one. Most of the time I only have yarn for one thing at a time, which helps, but at the moment I have 4 kids’ sweaters sitting in a bag, because 30% off was too good to pass up.
I think you’re definitely right about trying to focus on what needs to be done—my problem right now is that it’s all work-related, and there’s only so much I can do on my own, so then I get home and I’m a bit frantic from all this excess energy and a bit of hand-wringing about things I can’t control. That’s probably why I go crazy and cast on all the things—this strange feeling of control over some part of my life.
Ah, insanity you can leave behind at the end of the day!
Mine more or less follows me around asking for snacks and drinks, which is harder to get away from.
But I totally get the knitting for control over something. It’s about the only thing i do that has a start, a middle, and an end. Everything else just keeps going forever! (Or feels that way).
I’m certainly not a monogamous knitter–my attention span is far too fickle–but I try to limit myself to 3 or 4 projects at a time. I just finished a pair of socks, so it is time to tackle the cotton summer sweater and Reef Knot Tank for me, the dog sweater for a dear friend, my mother’s Christmas sweater, and the socks I promised my sister. I love a good to-do list!
Lists are awesome! I used to have pages full of “to-knit” lists and then something would happen and I wouldn’t necessarily go in order. I utilize the queue feature of Ravelry quite extensively!