It is very much in my nature to have too many projects going on at one time. Despite the pitfalls of getting overwhelmed, decision paralysis, and losing all confidence in my abilities because nothing is progressing fast enough, it’s actually a strategy. If I have ten projects in the works, I have nine other projects to shift my focus to when I get burned out or stuck. I create my own little cycle of productivity, and things do eventually get completed, even if they immediately get replaced with two more projects.
The current hydra of things to do include building this blog and knitting a velvet blanket. The last time I touched a traditional blog was back in the golden days of Vox and WordPress.com, both of which I had created to replace my Xanga. Boy howdy the internet is a completely different world than it was then, and my tech savviness certainly has not caught up. But here we are! Semi functional, hopefully readable, and maybe enjoyable? Jury’s still out on all of those.
The velvet blanket has been equally tricky. I’m an experienced knitter, I taught myself when I was a preteen from Youtube videos (Thank you, knitwitch!). That’s nearly two decades of off and on experience. This blanket has proven more difficult than I could have imagined. I learned very recently that there are two superstitions around knitting that bring bad luck: knitting with green yarn, and parking your needles in your ball of yarn between knitting sessions. Green happens to be my favorite color, and I’ve been parking my projects needles-in-skein my whole life. This obviously explains why one of the dogs took three of six skeins outside and tangled them together. It took the time of three whole runs of the Hades game my partner was playing for me to de-spaghetti-ify them.
The bad luck I’ve brought upon myself also explains the fact that I cannot keep this patterns straight in my head. It isn’t complicated, just knit and purl stitches in a chevron pattern. Even with the stitch markers between each repeat, it just will not stick. And complex lace knitting is my favorite! Why can’t I understand this thing? On top of that, I’m not sure I’m loving this pattern and yarn combination. I also cast on too loosely. All in all it looks a bit messier than I was hoping. Is there a frog in my future and another Great Un-Spaghetti? That has yet to be determined. So for now, this hydra head will be put aside, and I will shift to one of the other many things I have in the works.
-Yarn is Premier Yarns Retro Velvet in Emerald
-Pattern is Harvest Throw by Two of Wands
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