Monday, August 22, 2011

While Waiting

I practice multi-tasking on many levels.  Multi-tasking works well for me, and I wouldn't be able to accomplish nearly as much without it.  I'll admit that I'm not always successful.  My kids have stories of cooking food left unattended that stuck, boiled over or, worse yet, burned because I stepped out of the kitchen for "just a minute."  


Successful multi-tasking requires a series of mental gymnastics.  It's like solving a big puzzle - fitting the numerous pieces of my to-do list into the limited hours of the day.  Each and every day is different, and that's the real challenge.


Fall is knocking on the door and that means I'm gearing up for another round of shows.  There is a lot of dyeing in the works.




Winding and dyeing.  I hear the whirring of the winder in my sleep.


Once the dye pots are simmering, I find myself waiting.  Time to knit a few rows.  And my multi-tasking inner voice takes it one step further, "Why not knit a new booth sample while you're at it?"  Now knitting while dyeing requires a project that is next to mindless.  No lengthy instructions, no charts, no complicated techniques.  I don't want to become so engrossed in the knitting that I forget about the dye pots.  I definitely don't want them to boil over.  


The project must be easy to pick up and even easier to put down. While a garter stitch scarf would fit the bill, I need more than that for a booth sample.  And I think I found it.




It started out small.  Knit, knit, knit.


And grew into this.




There's still a lot of knitting to do which is good because I have a lot of dyeing to do.  The real fun with this project comes in the finishing. I'm not going to tell you what it is just yet, but I will give you a clue. It's not a hat.

1 comment:

Karen said...

I just read something about multitasking - to be successfully executed the tasks ought to use different parts of the brain. That's why knitting fits the bill so well much of the time.

Knit on!