I realize there is such a thing as unhealthy obsessions, and usually I know when not to cross the line. Yesterday…uh…
The good thing is, I didn’t go to Michael’s like I’d planned. I’d even hopped up off the couch (hopped up on caffeine as I was) and took a shower, fully intending to take Alex to the Michaels in KoP so I could take advantage of the sale on Bernat Satin Sport for a cute new scarf pattern I found on Friday night. It’s a gift, so shhh. Anyway, I was getting ready to go when it occurred to me, I have more than enough sport yarn in the basement; why go get more? Ummm, because I want to? Not a good enough reason. So I told Ryan he could make cupcakes (check Flickr for the pics/video) and I went to check out my sport yarn collection in the basement. Not quite what I had in mind. Moda Dea Dream works well enough for this pattern–the fuzzies blur out the lacy-ness, but the incredible softness balances it out–but the rest of what I had in stock didn’t quite suit the purpose. What’s a knitter to do?
I frogged the beginning of a crocheted baby afghan and started a new knit baby afghan. I kind of feel guilty because the crocheted afghan didn’t do anything wrong, but lately I just don’t feel like crocheting. Maybe it’s because they don’t make crochet hooks as nice as my Knit Picks Options circular knitting needles; if they did, I’d be crocheting up a storm, literally. There is, of course, a problem: there was a lot more of that skein in the afghan than was left in the skein, which meant I had a pile of yarn sitting on the couch, waiting to get put into something. Fortunately there was a Syracuse/Villanova game at 1 and a NASCAR race at 5, so I had plenty of time to work on whittling that pile down to something reasonable before the cats found it and turned the living room into a big gold spider web. (Lately Shadow has this thing about leaning his head on my WIP. Normally it doesn’t bother me but if I’m working on it and I pick up the yarn and it has dander on it and then I rub my eyes, well, I’ll probably end up looking like Marty Feldman. )
The problem is that I’m obsessed. I have 2 manuscripts in varying states of completion, and I even had the idea on how to fix one of them (I need to change POV on a major scene in the first quarter of the story), and what did I spend my day doing? Knitting. Obsessively. Maybe I was trying to avoid that scene, or that MS, or even the concept of success; maybe I’m happier when I feel half-finished. Come to think of it, if you saw the mess of half-finished yarn projects beside the couch, you’d agree wholeheartedly.
But why? Why is it I love to start something new and hate to finish it? Which isn’t entirely true, either. I finished the autism afghan and I think it looks great. Or maybe it’s outlived its usefulness. There’s nothing more I can do with it. I finished “Listen to Your Heart” last March and I haven’t looked at it since. It’s done. There’s nothing more I can do to make it better (unless an editor looks at it and tells me where he/she thinks it needs improvement). Somewhere I heard that the brain secretes a hormone when one is beginning a new project, and over time as the project goes on, the hormone fades out. Much like the love hormones one secretes when meeting someone special for the first time, and after a few years, it’s pretty much run its course and you’re left with cold, hard reality. Whatever that hormone is, methinks I’m addicted to it, or else I wouldn’t have spent the day working on an afghan that, at some point, I’m going to have to force myself to finish.
That said, I’m damn well getting through this one scene in Release Point or I’m going to kill someone. It’s been sitting for too long, and I really want to get this story finished so I can put it aside like Listen and move on to something new. Uh oh…
Knit & Run! 