in the last two years i have been busy setting up house, with a partner, for the second time in my life.
much of that "setting up" is being articulated in knitting. as the apartment fills out and warms up, and numerous handknit hats, slippers, sweaters and pillows are strewn about, well utilized here in everyday life, i find myself wanting to taper the flow.
i have been recognizing -- and battling -- my anxiety over halfknit projects vs. the virtual lack of anxiety i feel over half-written stories. i have no problem at all letting essays and short stories sit around for literally half a decade; the length of time they have been "alive" has almost nothing to do with my desire to see them completed. they are, after all, nicely organized in a folder on my computer desktop (and on various backups), and the fact that they do not exist in the three dimensional world adds to the satisfaction i feel in their "neatness". to finish them for the sake of finishing them would be like pinning a friend against the wall and saying to them, "let's get the whole relationship over with. this week."
with knitting, i often feel that something is lost when too much time goes by without working on a project that is just sitting on the needles. and without a written record of some sort, as to what is in progress, i tend to forget -- or believe that i might forget, and end up using energy in an inner litany/roll call of knitting. boring!
the anxiety about half-baked knits vs. half-baked stories does not seem to be related to my actual completion/successes. in the long run, i finish everything, both knitting and writing.
i have endeavored to corral my current incomplete and in-my-mind-only knitting in a convenient checklist-style template that i found with microsoft word. (nothing of the original format exists, actually, except the font size -- but it did help). voila! now i have, at a glance, the ability to see which projects on the needles are time-oriented and which may proceed at any whim; which projects need to come next, and which are merely hypothetical.
i can get the list out, move projects from category to category, delete some entirely, and add new ones. i love it. this practice has eliminated my fretfulness. i am pleased.
i think there might be some satisfaction when finished projects are checked off the list at a slightly faster clip than new ones appear, but i haven't seen it happen yet.
perhaps this need to clear my knitting out of the forefront of my mind is due to the fact that our printing press will be arriving within the next eight weeks or so. of course, i have projects in mind already, and maybe i need to provide a bigger space for those to percolate, given my fledgling experience with an iron handpress.
i am so excited about it: it is as though my lifelong loves of literature and textiles are two vines, and the printing press is the first hybrid bloom.
the printing press will, of course, create a brand new pile of half-finished projects to add to my half-finished knitting and half-finished writing. sometimes i do catch myself wishing for this magical white peaceful space where all projects of all types are finally completed and there are no loose ends anywhere. then i realize that there is a space like this. swedenborg space!
oh, look it up yourselves.