I have never been into knitting project monogamy. I’ve generally tried to keep things to a sane level, but that hasn’t always happened either. Lately, though, I’ve been becoming more monogamous. It isn’t that I am knitting something so utterly engrossing that I can’t put it down, so it doesn’t come out of enthusiasm.
I think, actually, it has come partly out of my increasing knitting ambivalence. I still enjoy knitting, but I have been experiencing a change in how I feel about knitting, about the knitting community, and about the place of knitting in my life. Essentially, knitting is not the key relaxation place it once was. I find much about the online knitting community intensely irritating. And I just don’t love knitting as much as I did. I still enjoy it, I sometimes still crave it, but it isn’t the same.
The other part, I think, comes from a sense of the value of my time which grows as I begin to seriously contemplate the end of my PhD, and the notion of my life afterwards. 2010 will be “All change, please!”, and so there is the idea of potential, of being able to change how I do things, what I do, when I do it, and where. There is a light at the end of the tunnel which emphasises my current situation. I don’t have much time to play with right now, and so not seeing results for the hours I put in is becoming increasingly unpalatable. If I do something (or nothing!) I want to get out of it as much as possible. Working on three or four knitting projects at once means I take a long time to finish something, I don’t feel like I’m making progress (you know, this is starting to sound like the PhD…), and that frustrates me because I need to feel like I’m moving forward.
And so I find myself in a situation where I am mentally queuing my projects. I want to finish the Spring Forward socks I’m working on now. I want to knit the baby jumper for a colleague of my Mum’s. I want to knit the pair of socks I promised my boyfriend’s mother. I have absolutely no desire to be working on all these things at once. In fact, the idea makes me feel distinctly panicked.
It is very strange and unexpected to me how my reactions to knitting has changed over the past couple of years, and actually, I suspect it is well documented by this blog, started at the height of my knitting fervour but now something I get a lot more pleasure out of as knitting becomes a decreasing part of its subject matter.
1 Comment
July 7, 2009 at 6:12 pm
I can identify with a lot of what you’re saying. My knitting time is at a premium these days, due to the wonderful but chaotic presence of a small boy who loves to “help.” His words, not mine. I finally got another project going that I’m absolutely loving and relishing, and it’s not because I want it finished, or because I want to own it. It’s simply because I’m enjoying the act- the process- of knitting again.
It’s part of life, isn’t it? We move, we change, we develop- and activities are more and less important to us as we grow.