Ecstatic

The blanket thing is consuming me. By the time I finish knitting one square I am eager to move onto the next, but first I must write the story to go with it and wait until daylight allows me to photograph the square so it can be posted in the blog. A backlog of squares could easily accumulate, but I will not allow that. The process of picking yarn, thinking about what the colours and textures mean, and using the visual exercise to meditate on the prose is turning out to be fertile for me. While knitting I think about the story, and write it once the square is finished.

I'm a very visual person, and sometimes my writer's block takes the form of frustration about spending so much time in the etched black-and-white world of words. With this project the visual and work-with-my-hands aspects keep me enthused, and the words have time to percolate without getting stuck. The last post, Ged's shadow, was an important story about a difficult subject. It required much thought and rewriting, which I did in three sessions over 24 hours. Even this offered a welcome change of pace, and the incentive of moving onto another square kept me engaged until the story was right.

As for the knitting, this is the first time I've made it up as I go along. No pattern.

I love this process. My mind is constantly intrigued: "What next?" Curiosity is what I need. It's a little like doing photography and then writing about the images, but there are even more layers.

This morning a post at Lavender Knits about Long Beach, Vancouver Island, reminded me of my visit there in 1987. It inspired me to create a square about Pacific Rim National Park. This afternoon I discovered with surprise that some photos from that trip were among the very few that were not destroyed in the first of two floods that hit my apartment around the time Mom died last year.

I already had an idea about what story to tell, but those photos suggested how to represent it visually. This evening for the first time I literally completed a square in one sitting, including developing a concept, choosing yarns and knitting it. It took about two hours. I had planned to take the work to knit night at Studio 490, but the meeting was cancelled. Instead I stayed home and listened to a Sibelius symphony and four tone poems while knitting. The story and photo I'll do tomorrow.

This is ecstatic task at its best. It has been a long, long time since I've felt so focused.

Twelve squares done, 226 to go. In order to complete the blanket in a year, I would need to make four or five squares a week.