We've been having an email discussion, and she made a passing comment at the bottom of her email...
"BTW, for when we knit late at night and we don't want to let go and stop... any suggestions?"It made me laugh, because I knew exactly what she meant... I bet every knitter does. That compulsion to keep going, that need to work one more row, to get to the next step, to knit on, late into the night, when you know you should be asleep.
But it's not the same. What D. is talking about is that compulsion to keep going on something for the sake of it. Because you're enjoying it. Because you don't want to stop.
This happens to me less often with knitting - because I am most often working on things I need to knit - but I suffer from it terribly when it comes to crochet.
I don't do much crochet professionally; indeed, I don't do much crochet at all. I rarely create crochet designs, and I don't often have the time to work on projects that aren't specifically design projects or commissioned work. (This isn't a 'poor me' thing, I promise, it's just the state of my to do list.)
And so no, D., I'm sorry - I don't have any suggestions. Just suffer along with the rest of us :-).
5 comments:
This happens to me ALL the time! As much as I love and treasure sleep, I love knitting more!!!
I find the problem with late night knitting is that you don't spot the mistakes as easily and it often means frogging in the morning or struggling to fix a dropped stitch many rows back. Everything works better after a good nights rest so I have learned the hard way to put my knitting down and go to bed!
Oftentimes if I want to keep knitting late into the night, I'll switch from a lacey or shaped project to a garter stitch project or a plain sock. That way the risk of huge mistakes is much smaller, but I still get the satisfaction of the last few rows. Does anyone close their eyes and see themselves knitting their most recent project when they are trying to sleep? It happens to me a lot.
And here I thought I was the only one.... I am working on a lace shawl and since the rows are getting longer, just doing 'one' more row can take a long time... But I will find myself knitting away and then suddenly I notice that it's a lot later than I thought.....
This is going to sound really abstract, but it really, really works for me, so I thought I'd give it a go and share:
In knitting there is creating and there is doing. The creating part is the all over urge to MAKE! the doing part is the stuff that says: DO IT NOW!. What really helped me is to see these things as seperate. The DO IT NOW part for me is heavily influenced by schoolteachers etc. who always thought it was better to finish now then later, and that it doesn't count untill it's finished. However, when I just listen to the creative part, it just wants to make, on its own terms, either now or later and it doesn't particularly care about finishing. There is no 'have to do' for this creative part. Keeping these two different motivations apart helps me to create on my own terms, which include stopping to sleep.
I only have this problem in making things I really, really like, like with knitting or sewing. For work etc I have bounderies already.
That concludes my metaphysical thought for the evening :)Now on wit the practical business of knitting!
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