Let the obsessing begin!
My shrink always says that personality traits are like two sides of a coin – sometimes they work for good, and sometimes they work for evil. For instance, the single mindedness, the obsession that helps me have a singular vision for things, and in turn, helps me to achieve so much that I want to do, can turn around and bite me in the ass. When my grandmother taught me to knit one rainy afternoon, she gave me some bent needles and some horrid, scratchy day-glo orange yarn and the blinders came down. I went home with that yarn and knit and knit until I had swatch after swatch of knit and purl. Until I could do it with my eyes closed. We’re talking many hours here, until my hands cramped. To show you how ridiculous I am, my first project was a basketweave baby blanket. My second project – a 5’x6′ slip stitch afghan using four colors. I am INSANE!
So now I’m obsessed with my blog. I decided that the name Purls of Wisdom isn’t really me. It’s pretentious, really, because I don’t know how wise this blog will ever be and moreso it doesn’t reflect my personality at all. So I bought (yet another) domain name. january one The more I think about it, it’s a perfect name for my blog. January 1 is my birthday, and has always been a really large part of my identity. And januaryone.com was available! Yeah for me.
I buy the freaking domain and I buy freaking MovableType and I’m all set to go and I can’t get it to be what I want. I feel like I’ve wasted two days already. I know eventually I’ll get there – I’ve built more than one website in my life – but there are so many other things I want to be doing rather than figuring all this out. I just want it to be done. I want to be knitting and talking about knitting, not obsessively thinking about my knitting blog. I need to flip the coin.
I haven’t touched the Shedir in days and I have probably two repeats before I can bind off the back of Georgie’s vest. He’s very happy with it though, so I’m happy about it. It’s hard for me to have more than one project going at a time – I never know where to spend the time.
One of the things about knitting, though, that I really love – and I’m only realizing this today – is that you can actually achieve what you see in your mind. I haven’t begun to even think about attempting to design something on my own, so maybe the difficulty is really there – but I get such satisfaction from following a pattern and having the yarn actually become what the pattern looks like. Everywhere else in my creative life, whether it be my writing or my photography, there is such a huge disconnect between what my mind sees and what actually appears in reality. The camera, in the end, is only a substitute for the eye. And the writing, well, that’s what makes writing so hard. You can never get on paper what’s living in your heart.
Best,
Cara
