Comfort Yarn

The general consensus about my "Rejection" entry was that it showed a mature attitude. But there was something that I didn't mention, something that helped me through the sting: The same day the universe offered comfort in the form of a new shipment of yarn from my favourite place to spend money while sitting at my desk: elann.com There are some especially good scores here. That shimmery blue fibre on the top right is 100% hemp. It will become a rambling leaves summer shawl. The dark stuff at the bottom is 20 skeins of dark pure indigo cotton den-m-knit. This is exactly the same thing, made in the very same mill, as Rowan denim. At elann.com, it is only $3.25 a skein. I've been waiting for months for the dark indigo to arrive, and the stock sold out within days (knitters know a good thing when they see it!). The coolest thing about denim yarn is that it is actually denim. When you wash it, it shrinks and fades just like a pair of jeans. Patterns are adjusted accordingly. I've started on the Cargo jacket from Denim People, knit in medium and dark, on addi turbos. The dark will go in the stash for another day. The red yarn is a silk alpaca blend called peruvian baby silk. Not sure what to do with it yet but it will tell me in time. I've also got some pure alpaca that I plan to use for my first lace shawl project, Flower Petal in Italian plum.

Yarn and knitting feed my creativity like nothing else. Not that I don't love the fresh clean paper of a new journal, my parker 75 fountain pen (introduced on the market the year I was born), a new bottle of ink...it all nourishes my creative soul. But the texture, colour, and sense of possibility in yarn takes me to different places than pen and paper alone can.

Knitting helps me with my writing. Besides feeding my creativity, it has helped me learn about process versus product. The knitter in me enjoys a work-in-progress more than the final product. I'm having a great time with these socks, which I will be giving away when I'm done with them:
And it is a lot easier to see the sense of possiblity in unknit yarn than in a blank page or computer screen. Can the writer in me can learn to appreciate the journey in the same way? Any creative life needs to be more about taking the small steps every day rather than gazing afar at the destination. I feel a surge of hope whenever I look at this stash of sock yarn.
Whose happy feet will it ultimately grace? For me, it is essential to have a pair of socks in the works at all time. The hypnotic trance of going round and round and round, the fast and easy sense of progress, the intrigue of seeing the pattern emerge from the self-patterning yarn. I've heard socks have been called the "potato chips" of the knitting world. Before you know it, you've finished a whole sock! And sometimes, before you know it, you've come up with a way to end that story, or figured out what is really driving that character. I want to get as excited by a blank page or an empty screen, a half-finished story, the kernel of truth that needs to sit for a time, as I do by baby alpaca-silk, shimmering hemp, and self-patterning sock-yarn.

Maybe this:

is really not so different from this:

And this:
Or at least that is what I can hope for in time.