Next finished item: a toy elephant from the Elefante pattern.



I used Knit Picks' "Wool of the Andes" in the Buchanan "hand-dyed" colorway.

It took almost the entire skein of the yarn...in fact, I had to do the tail as a braid of the remaining scraps as there wasn't enough left for the little i-cord tail.

And his ears came out wonky - they're a little too small. I think that was because I only had a crochet hook a size smaller than what the pattern called for, and I do tend to crochet a little tightly.

The elephant's name is Dudley, mainly because I watched "The Bishop's Wife" not to long before knitting him.


*****

I got to thinking last night about questions of security, self-confidence, overanalysing things, etc. Carol (at Go Knit In Your Hat) had a post up about pricing...about whether she was wrong for trying to price her yarns low ("what does it say about handwork when prices are low") and she was wondering if not having fancy frou-frou stuff might hurt return business...and she finishes by saying, "Geez, it's hard being an overanalytical pointy-head who thinks too much."

Oh, I know all about that.

I do that with everything. If I make some off-hand comment that was intended to be funny but someone reacts badly to, I obsess over it for days, and wonder if the person will forget it or if it's better for me to go and tie myself into knots of apology. One of the reasons I think I have a hard time, sometimes, in interpersonal interaction is that I'm so terrified of offending people that sometimes I don't express my own opinions, or I'm too neutral....if someone says something to me that I (possibly) mis-interpret as their being offended with me or upset with me I feel bad for days...

I've also been suffering some of the typical start-of-the-semester angst....do I throw over my "classical" way of teaching and attempt to go to a more discussion-oriented format? Do I stick to my guns even though "everyone who's anyone" in education says you Must Not Lecture? What about the fact that previous attempts at discussion have sometimes kind of fallen flat...I know not whether it was because students didn't have the necessary background, or they were shy of speaking, or they just wanted ME to talk, or if there's some weird thing about my personality that seems to shut down discussion, or what?

And it made me think of something I read years ago...it was in that Making Things book by Ann Wiseman. I don't have the book in front of me so I can't quote exactly, but I can give a general idea of the fable...

It was a story about how the forest animals decided to start a school. But they could not agree on a curriculum...the rabbits wanted it heavily weighted towards running, the beavers toward building. The owls said flight should be a component. In the end, some kind of mixed-curriculum was decided upon. But the poor rabbit children, no matter what they did, could not fly - they were made to stay after school and keep trying, they kept flapping and working their forelegs until they became muscle-bound in such a way that their running suffered, and the beavers, from trying to run, injured their tails from having to drag them on the ground and they found they could not build as well...(The bears, finding nothing in the curriculum to their liking, withdrew and founded their own school....)

I guess what the fable says to me is that we all have our own particular talents. And when someone tells us that we need to do something that is counter to our talents, we have to consider carefully - will doing this make me happy? Or will it impair my ability to be who I really am?

I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud here. I'm going to TRY to incorporate more discussion in my classes but I also have to recognize that sometimes being an "instigator" or "gadfly" isn't really who I am...that my ability to analogize and synthesize and explain should also get some time.