100Words
I forget that the holiday season intensity that everyone else talks about isn’t part of my life. Not directly anyway. What I forget it that while I don’t do any of the shopping and shipping, or travel planning, or whatever other people do for the holidays, I am the one holding the fort while they do it. I forget until I come home tired and fried. I forget until I realize that I am behind on my own gift making.
Yes, I have a couple of other occasions to knit for. There’s a whole new crop of babies in my life that I want to make something for. There’s still one more wedding gift that I’m behind on.
OK. Enough whining. I’m happy that I have all this to do and that all of it is about knitting. I was happy that when I felt an uh-oh for spending money the other day, and I looked at what I spent it on, it was presents for four people. Most of being behind is because this is the first year of knitting gifts for me. I don’t have experience with most of the designs I’m using. One of my neighbors admired the scarf I was wearing, something I’d made for myself, one of my experiments. I have that one design that I can just reproduce. I don’t have to figure out what needle size, or wonder whether it will turn out well or be long enough. I’m making a beanie for the son of a friend of mine (the brother of the lap doily recipient). I know that one will get done quickly because it’s “blind” knitting meaning I don’t have to look at what I’m doing.
Oh, and I’m also behind posting pictures and keeping up with the blog. There’s so much going on, I haven’t figured out where the end of the thread is and so haven’t yet unraveled it. I’m still writing the story of my NaNoNovel. That excites me. I started drawing again. Found this great book, whose title I’d have to get up an go find out, that made sense out of the one kind of drawing I never found a use for: doodling. I must say, though, that I don’t think it would have sunk in as it has if I hadn’t come back to knitting. Doodling in drawing is like swatching. Not like swatching for a project but swatching to learn how a pattern works. Working with Knitting Delight, I learned how swatching works with the design process. Doodling is like that. It’s a way to practice design problems and to work out technical details. From knitting lace, I recognize that doodling takes part of the whole drawing process and just repeats it over and over. Knitting the wedding scarf was a kind of doodling. I took one line of the whole pattern and repeated it. The same for the scarf my neighbor admired.
The effect of both processes is that I feel much more confident with both lace and drawing. I have a hard time knowing how to break things down into simpler pieces so that I can practice the parts I don’t know. From knitting, again, I found that the best way for me to practice is to design something. When I ‘m doodling, I’m designing the page. I haven’t quite got the hang of just scribbling. I want to learn something, build muscle memory. When I took Judo for a couple of semesters at school, Sensei told us that we should practice correctly. I get that. We train our muscles to perform for us while we relax into the pleasure of the task. Doodling… I’m making and solving a puzzle. I guess I’ll have to post some of them. They still look like a tangle of yarn to me, so, yeah. Knitting and doodling.
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