What can I say? It's been a month. That statement is intentional in all its potential interpretations.
It has been a month of pulling myself together, of putting to rights, of overwhelm, and ultimately of acceptance. 2022 has opened with a growing acceptance that my diverse interests are not, in fact, in competition for my time, but that each and every amorphous idea and unfinished yet ongoing piece, is in fact a thread in a more complex cloth, the fabric that makes up a person. Me.
There has been much activity around finally unpacking, around sorting and cataloging. These are seemingly mundane, perhaps even obsessive qualities, and yet they are necessary. I need to find materials. I need to know what I have, to be inspired. For all the exhaustion unpacking entails, it also feeds an imaginary world filled with ideas.
Although my imagination has remained fertile, my body has often been overwhelmed by fatigue. Actual knitting therefore tended toward the repose of simple repetition. Another block on a garter stitch blanket perhaps? Yes.
I finished stage three of the Stephen West MKAL shawl about a week after my last post. At the same time I felt plagued by trepidation concerning the next stage. I feared the border could either pull the shawl together or send it off into clownish carnival-land. I felt too sapped of strength to carry on. Enter deep purple alpaca. The blanket is now about three feet square. It is actually a nice lap robe size, and it has warmed my legs on cool evenings.
Blanket knitting also allowed time for my misgivings concerning the shawl border to subside. With thought, and some quick sampling, it seemed that four colors, rather than five, would work. I am now knitting the border and loving every moment of it.
Do we note the similarities in colors between these two projects? Do we wonder why I get myself so worked up about the worthiness of my own choices? I am surrounded with them, with myself then, every day. You would think I would have learned by now what works. And yet refinement is an ongoing thing, not a competition, not a need to do less, but a process of allowing more ideas in and then those ideas battle it out between themselves to see what works in this moment. Obviously this is a purple, green and pink moment.
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