Knitting Time Distortion
I’ve become convinced that something about the act of knitting distorts a knitter’s sense of the passing time. Perhaps we knitters truly are masters of the no-self, Zen masters who bend both yarn and the concept of time around us through intimate acquaintance with wu wei and an attention to detail that would make a savant blush. Of course, it could also just be that we’re entirely too optimistic to give ourselves a realistic time estimate for our projects. I would certainly make this a criticism specific to me, but I’ve noticed amongst the knit bloggers (Yarn Harlot as just one example(1)) that this is an all-too-common problem amongst those of us who turn loops into garments.
In my GTD project list, I put down “Knit a Slytherin hat for Stephen”. Keep in mind that I’ve already started a hat, hated it, threw out my progress, and started over once already. That’s about four or five hours already into a hat that wasn’t even finished yet. Nonetheless, when I put down a time estimate for this task, I only paused for a moment before putting down an estimate of four hours, and this esimate made sense to me at the time. I’m currently about six hours of work into the hat, and I’m not even to the decrease rounds yet. In fact, I have about eight more centimeters to go before I start decreasing.
I must say that I’m really digging this hat design though. I might like it enough to make it in Wolves colors for myself—especially if I could find some 100% worsted-weight wool in pure black somewhere soon(2).
In other news, today is a victorious day because I got my spare power supply for my Powerbook over the weekend and took it on into work. When I left the house today, I just unplugged my laptop from its cables and put it into the bag without having to reach down beside my desk to unhook the damn cables. Going to work is now less of an ordeal, and that’s sort of a life goal of mine.
Footnotes
- I sometimes can’t believe that I’m going to be in the same book with Stephanie “The Harlot” Pearl-McPhee this autumn. It cranks my excitement level to about eleven (which for me means that you can almost visibly tell that I’m excited if you stare for a really long time). Yes, I’m gushing. I’m also bragging a little. Forgive my immodesty.
- This task is much harder than it sounds. Nearly everywhere I look has dark “charcoal grey” but no rich pure black to be found. When I find black yarn, it’s inevitably a wool/acrylic blend.