WIP Wednesday :: crafting on the road

After two months of using my trolley as a dumping ground, the time has come to clear it out and reset, because at the minute my mind is feeling as cluttered as the trolley! On the top of the list, and on top of the pile, is my road trip crafting, both being ignored for different reasons.

Going into the trip, I struggled even coming up with projects to take. I should have known then, that it wasn’t going to be a productive trip like last year. As time ran out, I made some last minute snap decisions, and got busy packing. A knitting project, a stitching project, and my art kit. Job done.

We weren’t even fifteen minutes into the trip when I realised the first major flaw in my collection, most likely due to my “I need SOMETHING just get it done” mentality. The yarn I packed? Still in skein form. I should have known better than to go in without a plan, it never ends well, and here I was, learning the lesson all over again. That’s how I found myself awkwardly using my knees for tension, and winding the yarn by hand, dropping it more than once complete with less-than-polite self-talk as I picked it up and dusted it off and kept winding, muttering under my breath the whole time like a witch cursing the fool who brought us to the moment.

(can witches curse themselves? Enquiring minds want to know)

I didn’t love the pattern I chose, as a road trip project. It was slow and fiddly and hard to get into a good rhythm to just knit away as I chatted and enjoyed 4000km worth of family time. The yarn also, while beautiful in a skein, wasn’t knitting up in a way I particularly liked. I took it to the board. The board liked it. I told myself it was a me issue, that it would improve as I kept going.

It did not.

The project is currently in time out in the bottom level of the trolley. I am actually considering leaving what I’ve already knitted, then making up my own basic garter + lace pattern for the body of the scarf, then finishing the other end the same as the beginning. But then, I also am thinking about frogging the whole darn thing and coming up with another plan. At $25 for a 25g skein, I want it to become something I will actually wear, not something that will lurk in the bottom of my scarf basket just for the sake of saying it was finished.

The second project is a cross-stitch for my daughter. I didn’t make huge progress on it, partly because it’s tricky to stitch in a bumpy moving car, and also because of the pattern. A beautiful watercolour style design, it has lots of picky bits, which doesn’t worry me specifically, but I didn’t have all of the floss colours I needed, and I found the floss colours I did have, were quite spread out and I didn’t want to count too far away – when working on linen, each stitch goes across two threads of the fabric, and it can be easy to miscount by a single thread and throw the whole thing out, so I prefer to work in patches and stitch across to the next starting point.

Which is a long way of saying, I didn’t get a lot of it done either.

I did have a bit of a play in my art journal, and added five pages to my collection. And of course, there were the nine books I read, so the trip wasn’t completely without achievement.

Today, I’m clearing out the trolley, and hoping to find my mojo buried somewhere under the piles of ignored projects. I’ve started some hand quilting, but the cat has laid claim to the exact block I was working on, so I’ll have to wait until she wanders off to find some sun. We’re off to town in a bit for errands – groceries to pick up, dressy clothes to buy for the kiddos who insist on growing between events, committee jobs to do – and I might pick up a couple of the skeins I need for the cross stitch. I was to go container diving to get stuck into some more organising thanks to a Kmart delivery this week. Before all that though, the school table calls, and possibly a cup of tea and a choccie. The sun is out, spring is in the air, and I’m ready to find a new groove. Let’s do this!