Posted on August 8, 2010
A funny thing happened to me on the way to the grocery store. . . I made a wrong turn and ended up standing in the yarn section of my local craft store.
Now let me be clear, my mother taught me how to knit when I about ten or twelve, but I didn’t really take to it. For one thing, Mom had amazing talents with knitting needles. She knit snowflake sweaters, and cable sweaters, and even a Ramsay plaid mohair afghan once. I could not compete. For another, I had sweaty hands as a child and you just can’t knit with sweaty hands.
So, instead, I let Aunt Annie teach me how to embroider. I could embroider rings around Mom. Eventually I even bested Aunt Annie in that department, but I could never match her skill at tatting. (I still have some of her tatted lace, waiting to be put on a grand child’s dress.) But I digress.
Why was I standing there reading a Debbie Macomber book filled with knitting instructions?
Several reasons: 1) My critique partners are yarn harlots. And they have been trying to suck me in for a long, long time. 2) I hate grocery shopping, and 3) I needed a vacation . . . bad.
For the last several months I’ve done nothing on my weekends but stare into a computer screen wrestling with manuscripts, new webpages, and day-job demands. This weekend I hauled home a boat load of work-related things to do, in addition to a box filled with copy edits. I really needed to get the grocery shopping done and get back to the computer. I had a whole weekend planned — and it was all work.
But I just couldn’t do it.
So instead, ended up fingering yarn at the craft store. And the yarn won.
I bought some of it, and I started a project. I spent most of yesterday knitting while listening to the entire season of Morgan Freeman’s ‘Through the Wormhole.” In the process I discovered a few things:
1) Knitting is like riding a bicycle. Once you learn, you never forget how. I haven’t knitted since I was a teenager.
2) My hands are not nearly as sweaty as they used to me. So maybe there are some positives to being post menopausal, and
3) You can justify all kinds of procrastination when you’re actually making something.
So, here’s a photo of what I accomplished yesterday. This is the back of a basic V-neck sweater:
And yes those are watermelon earrings in the photo — a gift from Heidi Hamburg who is tickled by the fact that Last Chance has a water tower painted like a watermelon. I didn’t have the heart to crop them out of the photo.
It was really fun, yesterday, to get away from the computer and practice an art that is ancient. It really relaxed me. And I was surprised by how connected I felt to Mom, who passed away in 1997.
I’ll be posting my progress on this project from time-to-time. That way I might actually finish it. I was notorious as a youngster for starting knitting projects and never finishing them. Although I did ultimately finish the obligatory stripped scarf (Met’s colors), and the basic crew neck sweater (knit with really chunky yarn on ginormous needles.)
So, okay, CPs, you can snort and giggle and whatnot, but you finally sucked me in. You and the burning need for a vacation from the computer screen.
