It’s Furious Balancing

Sometimes — not often — I question what led me to knitting. Well, not so much as “what led me to knitting” as to “what keeps me knitting in the face of my abysmal spatial relations skills and overall level of nonverbal creativity.” Knitting certainly isn’t something that comes easily to me. Like modding for Morrowind, it pushes my limits — makes me think so intensely that I can feel my brain working overtime.

Not all time, though. I can knit along on my Tempting sweater, blithely knit-knitting and purl-purling away, until I’m distracted by a conversation (or The Husband) and make a mistake. That’s when Depression Sets In. Two purls instead of two knits… How the heck do I fix that?!

Well, I turn to knittinghelp.com and my copy of When Bad Things Happen to Good Knitters and try to find a way to fix things. It must show Lots of Pictures. I am Utterly Lost if I don’t have Lots of Pictures. This is why I adore knittinghelp.com — Videos! And I can replay them over and over andoverandoverandover and pause them and replay them ad infinitum until I Figure Things Out. Since it is next to impossible for me to dissect the anatomy of a stitch, or trace the path of the working yarn, or do whatever that thing is other people seem to be able to do with rotating three-dimensional objects in their heads, I either (a) mess up completely and frog the whole damned project, or (b) make what might appear to some of you to be some obvious, easy-peasy correction and then feel smug for the rest of the evening. Tonight, the answer was (b).

How does Madame Defarge fit into this? She doesn’t, really. I’ve just had that phrase (the title of my post) in my head for several days now and needed to commit it to paper media.¹ Despite her obvious drawbacks — bloodthirtsy, vengeful, dead — I seriously doubt that La Tricoteuse would be bullied by her knitting.

1. I hate the word blogosphere. If you ever see the word blogosphere in one of my posts — in a non-sarcastic fashion — you will know that the pods in the basement have taken over [↩]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 at 9:42 pm and is filed under Knitting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.