In the past few weeks while I’ve been traveling and teaching I’ve also been working on a new sweater for IK (Spring, I think…) – a very simple sweater with some i-cord details (edging, bind off for the neck and i-cord ties)
It felt so good last night to do a final block on it, wrap it up and send it to the Post Office – yahoo!!
Having a project leave my hands is like opening a new page in a sketchbook – my world is open (albeit briefly) to do whatever I want to do. In the short period between the time one project leaves and I remind myself of the other projects I have to do, I find that I get a lot of good ideas.
I’ve been asked a lot lately if I ever knit for myself – and the answer is, recently (and sadly) no. I haven’t done much for my kids, my husband, myself – although Atticus will benefit from at least one of the sweaters I’ve worked up for Men Who Knit.
I think of this as a sort of King Midas Syndrome. I’ve turned what I love (knitting & designing) into gold (mortgage) and it’s hard to ever love it in the same way. Although, unlike King Midas, everything I touch does NOT turn to gold, which is a great joy. But since I make my living doing something that I used to do simply to make myself happy, it would be easy to assume that the knitting has become drudgery.
In part that is a bit true. There are times when I’d rather do anything but pick up needles ad work a few more rows, but with a deadline looming it’s imperative that I finish a back/front/sweater/hat in due time. Those times are few and far between, though – they are unusual days.
Generally I love to pick up the knitting, no matter what I’m working on. I try not to overschedule so that I’m not up to the wall busy on a regular basis (although this Fall has been nothing BUT deadlines) and giving myself a little leeway works wonders to keep me ‘in love’ with my yarn. I also find that switching from knitting to teaching to writing to designing to crochet keeps my mind active. If I did nothing but knit up my sweaters on deadline day after day I’d probably be a little less sanguine about the whole thing.
The biggest hint that I’m in the right line of work for me, though, is that even after finishing a sweater and teaching a few classes over the weekend, I find myself itching to knit something – and will often volunteer to show someone a new technique if it seems appropriate to their current project. Maybe instead of King Midas it’s more of a Rumplestiltskin thing? Does anyone know of a good fairy tale where the hero(ine) knits? In that tale about the sister and her seven brothers, did she knit them the shirts to turn them from swans to men? The best thing about a blog is that someone will know this, and will tell me!