Old-Fashioned Fruitcake
But I’m darned if I know what to call it. Follow the process, if you will, and advise accordingly.
As so often happens, necessity was the mother of this design. I got sick of constantly mislaying my tiny scissors – the ones I use for snipping off ends of thread, yarn etc. What with working on the rose quilt and churning out a stream of granny squares for prayer blankets – not to mention wrestling with socks – those scissors were getting a lot of use, in a lot of different places.
Two eggs, if you want me to be precise. Two sessions of 25 minutes was all it took for me to realize that while the Pomodoro Technique works wonders for some, it was not for me. There are two reasons for this.
One is that if I am doing lots of small tasks, even batched together, my focus is popping about from place to place anyway. Trying to remember a specific set of things which I am supposed to be focussing on without losing that focus is just too much. Plus I tend to forget that I’ve set a timer and just womble off doing things.
The other problem is that if I am doing a big job, I like to get stuck in and do a big chunk of it. The absolute last thing I need is an alarm interrupting me every half hour telling me to stop working. Starting is always the hardest bit: why build extra starts into your work?
There is a serenity that comes with knitting socks. It doesn’t come with knitting large projects, nor with crocheting items large or small. It also, strangely enough, often doesn’t come with knitting socks, either.
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The thing about socks is that they’re basically foot-shaped. As a foot is not a simple piece of architecture, neither can the sock intended for it be. And so, like most peaces in this life, the serenity of sock is not always easily come by.
As Stephanie Pearl-McPhee observes, “In the nineteenth century, knitting was prescribed to women as a cure for nervousness and hysteria. Many new knitters find this sort of hard to believe because, until you get good at it, knitting seems to cause those ailments.”
