One of the reasons why I love knitting:


You can leave it for weeks - or longer - and come back to it and it's still there. If you've kept decent notes - or used a row counter - you can find your place again right away and start over, as if there had been no interruption in time.

The piece will not have unraveled itself out of pique at being ignored, nor will it have dropped all its stitches because it is depressed that you left it for other projects. It waits - for some people, projects wait unfinished for years - until you feel like returning to it.

It does not mind that work gets in your way of spending time with it. It does not care that you have other fiberly "experiments" you want to carry out. It doesn't require that you be totally faithful to it - not even LOOKING at other yarn - until it's done.

I think I said before I liked cooking and fiber arts because of the element of predictability - if you do something a certain way, you get an expected result. If you repeat the experiment exactly a second time, you get the same results.*

Dealing with people is not always like that - there are some people I deal with who seem to change from week to week (even day to day) and if I say something to them today they will be fine with it but if I say the same thing a week later - or a week earlier - they get all upset. Human psychology is unpredictable to me, and I find that exhausting sometimes. It's nice to be able to go home and knit, to pick up Hiawatha after an absence, and not have it all making snarky comments about how you've ignored it, or not being all passive-aggressive and not working with me.

(*yes, in cooking sometimes things go wonky but that's often explainable by air pressure or humidity or somesuch.)

Yesterday afternoon I went home early - the headache grew to a bigger size, and finally, when I was down in the office for something, the secretary told me to go home because I looked like I was in pain. (I was.) It took several hours - including an hour of just lying on the floor flat on my back - for the headache to go, but once it did, I had the whole evening open. And I decided that meant it was time to pick up Hiawatha again and knit some more on it.

I use one of the little Susan Bates cribbage-board type counters with complex projects like this - it helps me keep track of repeats as well as rows within the pattern. (The pattern I'm working on now has a 16 row repeat and I'm to do 10 repeats of it, so having a record of both is necessary). I very nearly got two repeats done last night.