A Day in The Life .... of A Wannabe Knitter

I started knitting a few months ago.
I don't really need another craft but was seduced by all the lovely yarns that are available to knitters -- hand-dyes, wool blends, and mohair and silks, and bamboo and sari waste.

My mother knitted for decades.
When we were children she produced hats, mittens, scarves and sweaters with ferocious regularity. She made fancy argyle socks and celtic-style fisherman knit sweaters that required difficult patterns and lots of concentration.

She typically did her knitting in the evening.
We would all be in the living room after supper. My dad, mom, brother and sisters. The television on. And amid this clatter, she maintained her concentration and produced beautiful items. For the family and for gifts. Never for herself.....

Now, I think I understand.
The knitting was her ticket to another planet, another zone. It took her away from the clatter. She rose above it all, lost in her work; imagining the finished result.

So I took a few knitting lessons at the adult education center in York.

So far I've only produced rectangular things like scarves. But I have a fantasy. I want to make something beautiful from a book called "Knit Kimona". Every piece in this book is fabulous and all are based on traditional Japanese clothing and all are created from simple shapes -- like rectangles.

I chose one fashioned after a traditional short Japanese jacket.
It's lovely and is meant to be knit from European flax. I bought one skein of a deep purply-blue to audition the pattern and the yarn. I want to experience the pattern and see if I like the flax; it feels a bit stiff: I need to know if I want it next to my skin. (I have been told that it washes well and gets softer and softer)

I don't own a yarn winder or yarn baller.

I'll have to wrap the skein around the back of a chair to create the ball. But it is uncommonly long. Too big for all my wooden chairs; too small to go around the backs of my upholstered chairs or the leather chairs. Hmmmmm. What to do?

I'll just lay it out on the table.
Simple.
I'll carefully draw the yarn out and around my fingers and into a nice tight round ball.

And you can see the result of this ill-fated effort in the pictures above.

I may NEVER get it untangled.

And I can tell you: this never happened to my mother!!!!