Chaotic Creativity

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo. ― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

 If you've been reading my blog for a number of years, you'll know that I am what is known as a "monogamous knitter." I do one thing at a time: I don't start a crochet project before I finish knitting my current project, nor do I touch any of my spinning projects until the current project is complete. One thing at a time, one project at a time, one daydream at a time... except for now...

I am pretty good at forging on through difficult times, but right about now I am finding it hard to navigate the things that are going on in the world. My day-to-day life places me in a position where I have to provide reassurance to people that things are going fine, that we have systems and protocols in place that will work, that we are making decisions with the highest standards of safety possible. This is mostly fine, except now the kids have gone back to school and everyone's energy is trembling at high frequency. On top of that, our area is currently sitting under a heavy blanket of smoke which has reached Vancouver Island from the wildfires in California.

So, in short: I do not feel fine. I feel high-strung and disorganized and not really myself.

Which means: bring on ALL THE PROJECTS.

It probably doesn't help that my current project is in a phase where I am knitting miles and miles of boring stockinette stitch in a light cotton that curls and flies this way and that as I move it around. I am currently working on the fronts of my re-engineered Dahlia cardigan and despite my best calculations and multiple measurements, each row just looked wrong and more wrong and wronger and wrongest... I KNOW it's right, but I just can't seem to trust my judgment on this one.

I bound off the first front side and then soaked the whole thing and blocked out that section just to prove to myself that it's going to be the right size. And thankfully, it IS right. It just looks really stupid right now:

Meanwhile, my brain has been running around trying to distract itself with other things. Whilst wandering through some crochet forums, someone posted this beautiful crochet mandala pattern and I immediately fell in love. I often have trouble justifying making doilies and mandalas because I never know what I'm going to do with them when they're finished. This time, I decided I would stitch it onto a sweater or a sweatshirt and wear it over jeans and look all cool and trendy.

Ask me if I have a sweatshirt. 

So I ordered this one from H&M, because I was in full obsession at this stage:

And then I thought about whether or not I had the right yarn. 

Ask me if I had the yarn...

So I spent a full day looking at crochet cotton in every shade of pink I could find. And then I spent an hour chatting with an online shop to find out if they could order the shade I wanted. And then I spent another half an hour looking at other things on their shop to make a basket that would give me free shipping...

Ask me if I have enough yarn for my current project. No, of course, I don't. I re-did my basket and the order is in.

But of course, I have other stuff on my mind, like what I am going to attempt with this yarn which came home with me a couple of weeks ago. It's all alpaca. It's going to make a sweater of some type, and I have currently three different ideas spiraling in my head at the moment... but I might need more yarn...

And then, there's this photo I shared in my last post. It's the Sophie's Stool Kit by Dedri Uys. I had been looking at it for a long time and finally decided to get it to go with my new knitting chair (which has not yet arrived... but I won't get into that right now). The only thing is that I am quite sure I will modify the colours in it to make the sides a charcoal grey instead of the stripey rainbow edge in the original pattern... but ask me if I have that yarn yet....

Anyway, I'm just going to carry on knitting my miles and miles of boring stockinette for now until I either finish my current project or I buy another pile of yarn or I go stark raving mad and start running around in circles. All of those sound like viable options at this point.

Stay tuned. And have a safe week.