Monday, March 10, 2014

The thwarted knitter

All I want to knit right now are socks.

It's like a compulsion - I want to burn through as much sock yarn as possible, as fast as possible.  That burning thing is probably the driver, the fact that I keep on not keeping up with all the yarn that's coming into the house.  Just looking at my Vesper and itching to knit it as fast as I can makes it SO much easier to pretend I'm not actually swimming in a ton of other kinds of yarn, too.

Conundrum: yarn clubs are great because you get stuff in the mail.  Sometimes you get to buy more of the club yarn when the club is over too, which is fantastic because you're probably going to fall so hard for a particular colour and want to knit something big, or just More, with it.  It's also awful because if you don't buy it during that tiny little window of Yes, you'll probably never have another chance.  Except then you end up storing more yarn than you can knit through.

The other day I saw an ad for really good sock blockers and I thought: maybe I should get some of those.  Then I washed some socks and spent about six years hanging them up the way I normally do it - draping each one over the bottom of a plastic hanger - and thought again because I was working my way through 19 pairs of socks.  NINETEEN.  Can you imagine trying to find space to hang up 19 sets of sock blockers?

Me neither.  Plus, you can hang other stuff on plastic hangers when you're not washing 19 pairs of socks.

(nineteen??? is this why my sock storage is so crowded now???)

Sometimes I worry what will become of me if I let myself go on knitting unchecked.  I think overall I get a lot accomplished in a year, but when I look at a particular day - all my downtime goes into knitting or writing about knitting.  I mean, I don't even watch a movie without knitting through it, and half the time if I'm doing chores or errands I'm thinking about knitting or what I'd like to write about knitting.

Is that bad?  Because sometimes it feels a little obsessive.

Probably it's just the reality of being a knitter.

You know, that knitting is going to take over, like weeds in an otherwise neglected garden.  Warm, bright, cuddly, useful weeds.  mmmmm, knitting.

(and yes, you're right to think the start of that sock is springing from a totally different yarn than the others that are tormenting me.  I have very little self-restraint right now.)

Hope you get to do some compulsive knitting today and I'll see you tomorrow!

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