Knit Pickin'

Am working on a scarf right now to add to the collection of things that will be offered up for sale later on this year. I have several knitted projects in the hopper at the moment and bounce from one to another so as not to get burned out with each particular project. The scarf you see here I have just started. It is being made with a sumptuously soft Alpaca wool from Bernat - Natural in color. I looooove working with this stuff. The softness I feel as I work with it is relaxing and soothing. It is even more wonderful to wear.

I seem to do most of my knitting and crocheting in the warmer months instead of the more traditional colder months, as most knitters and workers of fine spun goods tend to do. I think my yearn to do this stems from my childhood.

During summer vacations from school, my mother and grandmother would each find things for me and my little sister to do...to keep us out of trouble mainly, and to stay cool when it got to be too hot to play outside in the central Texas summer heat. One of the first things they would do is go through their yarn stashes, select bits of it they didn't have plans for and set us to crocheting.

I always loved digging through their boxes and bags of yarn. It was like going through a treasure chest and finding diamonds and rubies and sapphires and emeralds. The colors of the yarns were always so bright and vibrant...and my favorites were always the calicos (they call them ombre and varigated now). My sister and I made lots of pot holders and doll blankets with the beautifully colored yarns.

My grandmother preferred to knit and my mother preferred crochet, though they each did both. They were traditional cold weather practitioners of the crafts. In summer months they sewed and quilted. I'm just the opposite. Yarn calls to me when it's warm, and sewing machines and quilt frames holler at me in the cold. I believe the latter also to be because of the 'reversal' to keep us occupied during winter vacations from school. Whatever they weren't doing is what they would have us do.

So my 'bass ackwards' method of seasonal crafting keeps me busy year round and seems to serve it's purpose: the warm and wooly things I work on in the summer are ready to snuggle under and wear by the time it gets cold. The light, cottony, sewed and quilted things created in the cold, are ready for spring. Seems like a pretty good way to go about business...and scratch the itch of itchy knitting fingers for now.