Neatly Tangled

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but the boyfriend’s family has a cabin in Maine, and the boyfriend? He’s been building himself a pretty damned awesome solar power system for the place over the last couple of years. His charge controller crapped out a little while back, so we’re off with the replacement to get the thing up and running again.

I’m only bringing two projects, but it will only be a 28 hour trip, lol. If I do it right, one WIP will be a FO by the time we get home. 🙂 Pics if I remember to take them before we leave tomorrow. The light up there is gorgeous. So tempted to do my next pattern photoshoot up there…but I hope to have something finished before spring, lol.

I’m a bit caught up in delaying tactics at the moment, but I’m still working on things that are positives for the business. I did a simple bit of reformatting on my pattern template this morning that really improves the look of the pattern I tried it out on (at least to me, lol). I’ll let it wait a day and if I’m still this fond of it tomorrow, I’ll redo my existing patterns to have a consistent look.

I’ve also decided that I’d like to rework the samples for a couple of them, and redo some of the photography now that I have a camera again. I need to build myself some sort of setup where I have consistent light. I used to have one, but my reliable lamp died and hasn’t been replaced. Oh, the joys of a tiny budget…

Anyway. Making progress. Pleased with that. 🙂

I need a new name for this endeavor. The previous one is half made of fail. This is what happens when I write too early in the morning.

Anyway.

Pretty much nothing has been accomplished on the yarn scene the last few days because I’m busy blowing my nose repeatedly and wondering why I had kids in the first place and if I were going to, why am I not homeschooling? I love my little vectors, but kindergarten may be the death of me.

On the schedule today: I have knitting that I need to finish for a friend of mine and I want to take at least a few minutes to work in one of the patterns in progress. It’s totally my birthday and I’m off work and I’m putting my foot down and stealing the time. 🙂

Yesterday I managed to get a solid half an hour in toward the sample I’m working on, and developed a firm conviction that I need to stop getting ideas for such big projects, lol.

So today I don’t have to be to work until 10, and I hauled my ass out of bed at 6, figuring that would give me a good hour or hour and a half before the kids got up. I took a long hot shower, and made a pot of coffee, and luxuriated in the quiet. The blessed, blessed quiet.

And before you could say boo, the kids were up. Because somehow that took me an hour and a half. ROFL! Working nights I was accustomed to having quiet when I got home, and I had missed that so much I was too busy feeling all peaceful to get any work done. OTOH , my Rav surfing is out of the way for the moment. Heh.

So I’ll work a bit on the sample, which doesn’t require concentration of the same degree, and try again tomorrow. Because this is how I used to do it, dammit, and it’s how I’m going to do it again, one step at a time…

That’s the closest I can come, metaphor-wise, to what’s happened with the designing lately, and the knitting in general, and the blog. It’s all starting to sound like excuses to me at this point; I need to just write.

I had a big thoughtful post all planned about the mental traffic jam that’s been holding me up, and inspiration v work, and a whole lot of other nonsense, and it’s all fled from me. I think my biggest mental block is that at some point I stopped thinking of myself as a designer and started thinking of myself as someone who used to design, back when life allowed me to.

I’m calling bullshit on myself for that one.

There are really for real things that I’m struggling with right now…my health’s still lousy, and I just changed jobs again, and I have three very active kids and an ex and a current partner who has his own family problems and I feel like I’m stretched so thin you ought to be able to see right through me. I’m still not all that good at working in the 10 or 15 minute spaces that are all I can seem to create some days, and I’m great at letting myself get crowded back out of the longer spaces I try to create, and I wonder sometimes how much I want to do this, given how damned hard it is for me to manage everything I’ve already got on my plate.

But every time I come back to it and ask myself that question, the answer is desperately. I can’t think of a damned thing I’d rather do. I love it, love working out the stitches and discovering how a yarn behaves and watching something brand new take shape under my hands. I love the way it feels to concentrate completely, and I love knowing that other people enjoy the results of my work. It’s insanely rewarding for me on so many levels.

Sometimes I step back and I think to myself, it’s only crochet, it’s only knitting, what does it matter?. But you know what? It matters. It matters to a hell of a lot of people, and it matters to me, too. It’s beautiful and practical and it brings us joy. And that joy carries meaning, even if it’s something as simple as bringing a smile to my face when I wash my dishes.

I have an odd feeling that I’ll be up earlier than otherwise in the morning. I think I have a swatch that needs my attention.