I started out being strictly consecutive; I was a student knitting on a dime, and the extravagance of buying up yarn I could not use in that budget cycle was as astonishingly foreign to me as the thought of one of my residence friends having an account at Holt Renfrew courtesy of her parents (she never abused this, but did have the best lipstick I'd ever seen.)
Now, as you will have noticed if you've been around Hugs long enough, I lean more toward concurrent. In my busy times I'll pick up between two and four projects in a day and make a little headway on each one. But this isn't my natural approach to life. I much prefer to get one thing done and then build on it, which makes concurrent a little stressful, and that's why, in January, I decided to recover from Christmas Knit Burnout by going back to one thing at a time.
That was fine until I got really annoyed with the socklets. I am just not enjoying them at all - not the designing, not the making, not the finished product. I needed something different! So I let myself go ahead and start the hat I want to match my new pink and grey scarfything.
Designing this on paper took about 20 minutes - math and typing included - and so far I'm knitting it exactly as I wrote it down, so it's a perfect cure for socklet boredom. It's becoming more and more clear that the stitch pattern is kind of lost in this yarn, what with all the white and dark bits scattered across the pink...
... but I need this to work the first time so I'm calling that a Design Feature.
I can't help noticing how life and art are constantly reflecting each other. I don't remember whether the knitting went concurrent first or in part as a reaction, but in the last few weeks three different women who are either close family friends, or close to somebody else who is, have become critically ill. One died over the weekend, another was told she will die from her condition, and a third is recovering from surgery, which we are hoping has solved her problem.
So - even though the concurrent knitting thing has been a Win, I feel somewhat ready for some consecutive sads. Though sads in any quantity are not fun - if they were, they would not be sads.
Other considerations on the hat:
a/ Guilt
I'm bringing the hat to a meeting with me tonight as I'm into a long patch of straight mindless knitting and, more importantly perhaps, this pink and a boring circular needle will be less engrossing to others in the group than the multicoloured stripe on four short needles I brought last week. I felt terrible to have been a distraction... just not enough to not bring knitting this time, heh.
b/ Memory
A big patch of the hat got knit over Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I haven't seen that movie in years and was struck by the whole 1970s suburban setting - the period I know from my childhood - and how true it was to those endless-seeming summer days of non-routine, in which nothing bad is supposed to happen but actually does in small ways all the time. Though my dad never got obsessed about acting on an opportunity to leave earth in the company of aliens, so: how bad is bad?
c/ Wearability
In spite of being nearly the end of April and there having been several hot days already this year, it's cold enough today for a hat to be A Smart thing. In fact as I type this, I'm remembering that I really need to get one on my head before I go out. Which will be soon. So maybe I'd better stop typing and find one?
Time Check: yep, gotta go. I hope your day is All Good, regardless of either knitting or anvils, and whether they are consecutive or concurrent!
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