One of the upsides of being a Stage Mum is that, when you've finally driven through the rain and traffic, across town, in peak hour, to the Swing Dance Class at the End of the Universe, you get to sit for 2 hours, and there's absolutely nothing to do, but knit.
No washing, no dogs dropping balls hopefully at your feet, none of those tiresome things you should really be doing that always spoil the fun of sneaking a little craft in during work hours. 2 hours of guilt-free, uninterrupted knitting.
I'll drink to that.
I used to knit a lot. All the time. Obsessively. I used to make extraordinary intarsia projects, involving 30 and upwards balls of yarn at a time. I would spend as much time untangling the yarns as I did knitting. I had infinite time and infinite patience, and, most tragic of all, I gave everything I made away, and have none left to show, and you probably don't even believe me. Somehow I thought that there would always be another.
But then I became a mother. Free time became a distant memory. Needing to finish a row before I put the work down became a joke of heartbreaking proportions. And stickybun fingers wanting to have a go when Mummy wasn't watching put paid to knitting completely. I rediscovered crochet, which doesn't reduce one to a foetal position when a child (or dog) runs off with the ball of yarn, while it's still attached to your work.
When I took it up again, quite recently, I was surprised at how pleasant it was (and how rusty I was). There's something about the texture of handknitting that can't be duplicated by machine, or crochet, or anything else that I've ever seen, and I'm enjoying it immensely. My dog did try once to mess with it, but found his ears boxed so resoundingly that his appetite for yarn has sinced mysteriously waned.
So I'm just fooling around with a stitch sampler really, just to get my skills back up to scratch, but a number of people have insisted that I make it into a scarf. Really? Oh, alright then....
This is a heart in progress (story of my life, really)....
Heart, ducks and teddies. I had a cross stitch magazine lying open next to me and threw these in, but the ducks didn't really make it....
And this is the whole thing, though it's actually quite a bit bigger now, but no shots handy...
There's a Swing Ball coming up on the 12th, I'll be the one huddled in the balcony seats furtively knitting while the other 699 people Group Charleston like the War just ended.
