It Felt RIGHT!

I picked up some knitting I was working on (an Aran sweater). I had set everything up: the pattern (my own design) was laid out in front of me, the light was adjusted, and I had a blanket to wrap around my feet to keep me warm.

I worked my way through the first row of the day, started the next row, and then it happened. Everything just felt right. I literally felt my body relax, my hands develop a flow as the yarn fed through and the stitches were knit. I was focused, but not obsessively so, on the pattern. Some might call it Zen knitting, but I would describe it as my ‘muscle memory’ taking over.

Muscle memory is what dancers and martial artists train for (I’ve been both). It’s learning to do something so well, that your body does it before you have to think about it.

That’s what happened to me while I was knitting. After the first row was knit, my body ‘remembered’ what it was I was working on, and cooperated with the process.

I’m sure that if you think back to the projects you really liked working on, you’ll find that, perhaps, one reason was that your muscle memory was making everything go more smoothly.

Since repetition and practice are needed to embed muscle memory, beginning knitters will not attain this state immediately, but I’m sure that one reason that so many knitters stick with knitting is that they DO achieve this relaxed, easy flow to their knitting.

So maybe knitting isn’t the new yoga, but the new martial art!

From Done to Almost Done

After shovelling snow for an hour, I got my car dug out (with help from a neighbor) and cleared the walk from the back door to the sidewalk. Then I looked at the pristine snow in my yard and threw myself down and made a snow angel.

I also have finished some belated Christmas gifts:

two ball band washcloths and a fabulous bar of soap from Frost Fish Cove Soaps for my sister and her family,

Ice Queen from Knitty:

for a friend (luckily, she was away for the holidays). There are beads on it. If it looks a little weird, it's because I draped it over a plastic pail. It took me three days of trying, frogging, leaving to calm down, and returning to get the picot bind off right.

And tonight I have to finish a pair of fingerless mitts to send off as part of a swap. I "designed" them myself, and they're simpler than they look, since there are only two rows of stranded color work in every 8-row pattern repeat. Part of what I was experimenting with was the way colors change based on what color they are next to.

My Roving Dog

I followed the directions in "Fleece Dog" and ended up with this cute little guy.