Considering

Lately I've been completely tuned out, turned off. I'm like an electronic device that nobody has bothered to charge for weeks. Or just hasn't bothered actually powering up. The first sign of this was the overall lack of knitting. As is often the case, I was the last to notice. Other people noticed. My students commented first: Johanna, what happened to those socks you were knitting? Johanna, have you finished the xxxx project yet? Johanna, why don't you ever KNIT anymore? My co-teacher noticed. And of course, my faithful blog readers noticed the lack of progress in my knitting goals. Didn't you?...... (cue the crickets)....

There were other signs too, of course. It's not just the knitting. But it's an interesting question to pose to the universe: why is it that we stop doing things we love sometimes? Readers will go for a period of months without reading anything. Writers (and this is true of me in particular as a writer) will go a year without writing much worthwhile, and then suddenly come back to it with a vengeance. And knitting, while it is pure medicine for my soul, has suffered the same odd fate in my life too. Where does our joy in things go when it goes missing?

So last Thursday I decided to take action. I was at Webs and just decided to buy the yarn for a very cool blanket that my friend was knitting. It was almost completely funded by gift certificates from my birthday, so it was guiltfree. It's a neat blanket. You make a striped hexagon out of a few parallelograms, then sew the hexes together for a neat optical illusion effect. It's called the Illusion Cube Blanket. I've linked to the pattern, and will post pictures soon. I have finished 5 hexagons, and it's really fun. I hope it's enough to rekindle some joy in yarn and the work of the hands.