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.

insert knitting pun here

I have taken up knitting. I am hoping that it will help to save me from insanity by giving me something vaguely creative to do with my hands during the times when my brain is frazzled. Which unfortunately is most of the time during term time.

I am knitting a scarf. It is multicoloured and currently about 16 inches long, which is officially too short for my neck. Still, so far I am enjoying the knitting experience and may once again adopt the pastime of making little badges of pretend cocktail stick and bead with a little bit of knittery attached. Like mini knitting needles, see? I had forgotten I used to do that, aged about thirteen. I sold them, you know. For about a week in 1983. I may take this up again too.

This time next year I'll be an Etsy millionaire....

yarn