I set up the yarn swift and the skein winder. I wound skeins of yarn into balls.
There should be nothing at all remarkable in that statement, but there was. I hadn't had an appropriate surface to which to attach either swift or ball winder in my new old house. Of course that situation will be rectified after the remodel, but it was a problem. I had to wind yarn by hand, with the skein draped around my knees, or occasionally the back of a chair, and although it is not difficult and people have probably done it for hundreds, if not over a thousand years, I could not bring myself to do it. I would pick a project based on whether or not I had to wind the yarn, and that is not the best criteria.
Now that I think about it, there was probably one place where swift and ball-winder could have been used but I never thought about it. This reminds me that the problem was more about me than it was about yarn or winding or even knitting itself. I was still struggling with allowing myself to do what was right for me, struggling with whether or not my own inclinations, my own choices, were in indeed good and adequate. But that is not the point. I wanted to knit, to spend all my time knitting, or playing with fabric and fiber in various forms and incarnations, and yet I also struggled with some deeply seated inner voice that said my choice to do so was "not good enough". I could have created a place to wind yarn. I could have created a comfortable chair in which to knit, and yet I chose not to.
That makes it sound simpler than it truly was. What I really needed to do was accept that sitting and knitting was just as valid, in fact perhaps more valid for me than a bunch of the outside volunteer activities I was undertaking. I needed to accept a broader, and more inclusive version of self-acceptance.
This was one of my goals for this month. And I have in fact been knitting consistently and regularly, alternating between a couple of projects the red lazy days shawl, some fiddling with the lazy days tunic, despite having said I was done with fiddling, and a prayer shawl knit out of the blue classic elite paisley yarn shown above.
Nothing is finished; everything is progressing. I had hoped to tackle more projects, but somewhere along the line I realized that I have been so starved for this creative time that I just need to let it flow at its own pace. At this moment that is a snails pace and it consists only of knitting, but the yarn is drawing me in and I am perfectly content to simply knit.
