Thirty-Minute Projects

A light exists in Spring Not present in the year at any other period When March is scarcely here ― Emily Dickinson

While I am working on my projects, I find myself daydreaming about what I am going to work on next. I make plans in my head about random skeins of yarn in the stash, working out ideas and patterns and shapes that I'd like to create, and then I mentally queue them up to be worked on as soon as the current project is complete.

Sometimes that works and sometimes that doesn't work.

This time, I had an idea to work on another stripey experiment with some skeins of silk-blend yarn that really deserves to become something...

And then I started dreaming about what do with some fingering weight BFL that is light and lofty and dreamy...

And then I started thinking about some cakes of cotton yarn I bought a couple of years ago in Winnipeg. "What the heck am I going to do with those?" I mused. And then I thought about what it might be like to weave them. And then I looked over to my loom and cringed because I've had a project languishing on there for over a year now. I felt pretty sheepish about that:

I set my teeth and decided it was time to get that project off the loom. Luckily, my loom fits nicely on my lap when I am sitting on the couch, and so I've spent some evenings watching tv and weaving... and unweaving, and weaving and fixing and weaving some more.

Part of the reason I hadn't finished that project is that I felt woefully undereducated about weaving in general. I mostly just play around on it, and I have no real frame of reference as to whether or not I am doing a good job. I've watched a few videos and read a few articles but I would like to spend some time really learning about what this loom can do. But before I could do that, I needed to get this project finished.

It had been so long since I'd started this project that I could barely remember what I had done with it. It was really a project to use up some scrap balls of merino/cashmere/nylon yarn and to play with colours and stripes. Unfortunately, I ran out of that yarn before I got to the end of the warp, and so I pulled out another random ball of fingering weight yarn and decided to just go for it and weave until I ran out of yarn. Because it was a little lighter in weight than the other yarn and not really in the same colour family as the rest of it, my heart wasn't really in it.

But needs must. I wove and wove and wove until I reached the end of the warp. I did my best hemstitch at the end, and then I cut it off the beam and started unrolling it from the loom...

And then I gasped. Wow. This thing is so beautiful:

I trimmed the fringe and then wet blocked it and let it dry. I was going to do a twisted fringe on it, but I decided that 1) I couldn't be bothered and 2) it looked nice enough as it is. I am quite enamoured by it:

As I was trimming the ends, I thought about all the things that were wrong with it... all of the things I wish I knew how to do better. But it annoys me when people share projects and start it off with, "It's not perfect, but..." Of COURSE it's not perfect. That does not make it any less worth admiring. And I think it looks pretty cool for someone who is still learning what her loom can do.

Meanwhile, I am also busying myself with what I am calling my "thirty-minute projects." These are projects that I work on for about thirty minutes before I get up and go do something else. I'm not usually a person who likes to jump between different things, but it seems to be working for me right now. 

So, my thirty-minute projects are:

1) My watercolour flower patterns. I've been enjoying painting a few flowers and leaves and then coming back to them later to add more ideas:

2) My first pair of socks. I never thought I'd be a sock knitter until I became a sock knitter. There are just some skeins of sock yarn that really just should be socks. Why fight it? This is some yarn that I had leftover from when I made my Mushroom Sweater a while back. I had a full skein and about a third of another. Let's just have some warm feet for a change:

3) My summertime spinning project from last year. Yeah... I originally planned to sit out on the deck last summer and spin four bags of merino/alpaca/camel/silk roving and make something soft and squishy and lovely out of it. That did not happen. But I've discovered that spinning need not last several hours. It's amazing how much you can spin in thirty minutes. I'm looking forward to seeing how this turns out:

But the truth is: the real reason I haven't started a big project right now is that we're preparing to travel soon, and I don't want to carry a big project with me. It feels weird to say it aloud... almost wrong and sacrilegious. I feel the need to justify it as a trip to visit family we have not seen in nearly three years. I feel excited and then guilty about being excited. I feel worried, but not worried, but worried. But I'm trying not to tire myself out with thinking before I even leave because I need the energy to keep me healthy the entire time.

Sigh. I want things to feel less tiring altogether.

Anyway, I'm off for a cuppa. Have a good week.