Murphy's Laws of Knitting, a Beginning
Isn't that a beautiful nighttime scene pictured to the side? Doesn't it make you feel warm, like having hot chocolate and wishing everyone well? If you were a normal person, yes. I have to make things complicated, so even though my first response is, "Oh, how cute," the second one is frustrated murmurings that are not Alan Dart's to blame.
I've decided that Murphy's Laws have found an especially cozy realm in the land of knitting. At first I used to think that my calamities were due to rushing or needing more experience. As I became a more experienced knitter, I found that, as the Yarn Harlot has said, I can make my mistakes faster. I'm a fairly intelligent person, so that didn't seem to explain my frequent mishaps.
I think that sometimes there is a conflict between the right and left sides of our brains that causes some of our troubles in knitting. I think that one part of the brain goes on autopilot, when actually we need to be keeping a sharp lookout for the next step in the pattern. Maybe there's a pleasant right brain haze that keeps us from seeing the important left brain details to avoid mucking things up.
And then there are problems like errors in patterns, but that's not all that common. When I cook, I hardly ever make a mistake. I haven't had a car accident in years. But knitting has, by its nature, taught me a lot about patience and about not being (too) bothered by most mistakes.
At any rate, here's a beginning list of observations of Murphy's Law as it relates to knitting:
(1) The older a specific yarn in your stash, the less likely you can buy more of it if needed. That’s just to be expected. Murphy’s Law steps in and makes it so that the older the yarn, the more likely it is that you will need more than you have of it when the time comes.
(2) The later at night you work, the more disastrous will be the mistakes. Again, it’s not surprising that you might make more mistakes, or worse ones, when tired. What Murphy’s Law does is, make you deal with them poorly or irrationally. Such as, when you rip it out, you simply make the same exact mistake again, or you make a new kind of mistake the third time, then you rip out way too much of the whole project, or in one case where I was making a hat and had started knitting it in the round inside-out, just saying that it won’t show and keep going. In the morning, I could see how self-deceptive that was.
(3) The closer to the deadline a project comes, the more likely something disastrous will happen.
Self-explanatory.
(4) You will get your best idea for Christmas presents too close to the day to actually accomplish them reasonably. Little knitted sheep ornaments for all the presents? A group of Dickensian mice, all dressed up in Victorian clothes, to make caroling scenes (designed by Alan Dart, but I had my own variation in mind).
My idea a la Dickens just before one Christmas was to actually make all the clothing removable on the little mice, so that a child could enjoy dressing them up any way that he/she wants. The scene could be changed from time to time for variety. I had a whole little household and town imagined. But trying to do it two weeks before Christmas along with the other knitting led to little baggies of mouse parts and aprons and skirts, and not much else. But I love these little guys, and one year I will, with God's help, finish them all.
Felted Christmas-themed coasters for someone who has everything? Knitted flowers for hair clips for all the women? Personalized Christmas Ornament balls with the person’s initial on them? How about a special Celtic initial for the new baby in the family? How about cute mochimochi figures to make into bookmarks for all the family?
It always sounds great when I have the Christmas fever. Never mind that there’s still a party to attend, last minute shopping to finish, cooking to do, and cleaning, though the cleaning is optional.
My goal now is to write down those creative ideas when they occur, and instead of staying up past midnight to make whatever it's going to be, plan to use it for next year’s idea. But that means writing it down in a place that’s easy to find next year. I actually have a knitting journal that I put all this stuff in, so I can search for it later. Plus the maturity to wait. I get a little giddy around Christmas.
(5) Starting early on Christmas knitting only gives a sense of complacency, so that you tend to slow down and find out too late that there’s not enough time to catch up.
(6) You can’t win at Christmas knitting. I thought I’d learned that, and yet, last year, when I injured my right shoulder doing Zumba, and actually had to learn to knit one-handed for awhile, decided to make all the men in the family knitted hats. I worked on them through New Year’s week.
Why so many of these are related to Christmas, I don't know, except that that's the major deadline of the year for me. I'd love to hear about more corollaries to Murphy's Law.