Shiny Side Up

After a long week of tribulations whose details I will spare, I made it to Friday.  At last it's time for my long-awaited bike ride with my sisters.  Here I am on Growly, my trusty steed of six years.  She and I have been through a lot together, and look forward to many more miles.  Of course, when I really ride, I wear protective gear; this is just a snapshot my friend took for fun.

I have been asked what if anything motorcycles have to do with knitting, and the answer bears more introspection.  The similarities are many:  Both are the kind of thing people tell me they always mean to try one day ("I wish I had the patience to do that!"), both require gobs of practice and huge amounts of concentration.  Both require a degree of courage, which I should add is NOT the absence of trepidation, only the fortitude to press on in the face of it.  Both activities seem to give others a handy tool for pidgeonholing me:  Oh, she's a biker/Oh, she's a knitter.  And both are about as expensive and time-consuming as I choose to let them become.

Tomorrow will be my second day off from knitting since April.  Not that I can bear to leave the knitting at home - I get too squirrelly for that kind of abstinence - I need to know I can always work if I want to.  But I will admit that the rest for my wrists and elbows will be really nice.  I am maybe halfway up the body of the Leopard sweater, so I feel pretty good about its progress.

If somebody asked to see a picture of the real and unvarnished me, I would have to say this is it.  Till next time (I will) keep it shiny side up.

Keep Swimming

Here is Finn, my faithful (albeit somewhat indifferent) desktop companion.  He leads by example, never getting too riled up about things one way or another.  He appreciates his treasures, but doesn't spend a lot of time obsessing about them.  He takes the time to hang out amongst the greenery, and remembers every once in a while to come up for air.  I could learn a lot from a goldfish.

I have begun my next Nouveau Nordica project , knitting with abandon in the sure knowledge that I have calculated both the size and the gauge correctly.  Or Not.  But the abandon part is true at least.  There is nothing like the momentum of enthusiasm I find in the first few inches of a new sweater.  I think it comes from the pristine quality of a project that I haven't (to my knowledge) messed up yet.  That first screw-up usually ends the honeymoon for me.  After that its just a regular old marriage: Do your best, keep on working, and hope it will seem funny to you later.

I spent some time yesterday on Project Management.  This is a euphemism I use to describe the act of fidgeting around with and reorganizing all my information.  I make spreadsheets and fill in notes on my calendar, and generally revisit all the parts of the project without actually working on any of them.  I guess it's my way of taking the book's (or maybe the author's) temperature.  Something drives me to intellectually pick up and put down every single piece of the work, making notes about what stage everything is in.  I am always hoping to find signs of actual progress during these navel-gazing sessions, and I guess I do, but it's never as reassuring as I would hope.  Ultimately I know what I knew before the fit of introspection:  The deadline is coming and I better haul ass.

The phenomenon that really blows my mind is the way projects have of filling up the time they have been allotted.  I know that if I had a year to do this book, that is how long it would take me.  If it were four months, rather than six, I guess I would somehow do that, too.  So I'll just have to keep swimming.

Too Darn Hot

DH:        "Why do you keep groaning like that?"

MSH:    "Because the temperature outside is about 95 degrees Fahrenheit, which makes the temperature in our living room about 100 degrees Fahrenheit, which makes the temperature under the wool sweater in my lap roughly equivalent to that of a blast furnace."

DH:        "You should really time your next book so the deadline is in the spring."

MSH:    "You should really time your next opinion for a moment when I'm not holding pointy sticks."

I pressed on all weekend, promising myself that if I kept on schedule that I could go on the motorcycle trip I have planned with my sisters.  That was only somewhat motivating, though, because I know I would not miss that ride for anything, schedule or no.  In the end I had to remind myself how much more fun it will be to take the time off from knitting, knowing that doing so will not put me further behind.

Weaving in the ends, weaving in the ends, we shall come rejoicing, weaving in the ends...

Inserting the sleeves...This part always reminds me of lacing up corsets when I worked as a dresser at the opera.

Putting on the perfect buttons (hardware can sometimes be an odyssey for me)...

And the final step.  A gardening book I once read emphasized the importance of putting signs on things.  The theory was that while a little patch of herbs in the back yard is all well and good, a series of little markers reading "Parsley" lends a sense of intent and permanence that elevates the whole enterprose to a new level.  Sweater labels are like that.  I think of the little tag at the back of the neck as the punctuation mark at the end of the sentence.  A label validates the project by making it  official.

Next:  Written Instructions!