potential

The scarf is growing. It is about as long as a scarf that is a bit too short, and I may well finish it by the weekend. I am going away for the weekend, to a place where knitting would be a Good Thing to do. I want to knit something else: a shrug, another scarf, a bag, my Etsy fortune.* I must find something else to knit, and some wool, no, yarn by the weekend.

I spend long hours perusing free knitting patterns and online yarn-not-wool shops. I stare at patterns, squint at the pictures: could I make that? My eyes slide over the passages filled with jargon I do not fully understand: bind off, shape, yarn over, right side. These details do not concern me. There is so much potential; it reminds me of a time when I would contemplate the un filed steel edges of etching plates and imagine the myriad opportunities for brilliance ahead. Never mind the slow inevitable slide into a mediocrity that generally followed; the potential has always been the best bit.

I am liking the knitting (I haven't yet tried the purling). I confess that I am wondering about knitting an ukulele.

*say it often enough and it might come true.