InnerShelter: Checking in

I have to admit it is not very clear to me what to write about in this blog right now. Enamel, clearly, and knitting, surely, but… I haven't been doing much of either lately.

Well, I have been knitting a lot, but I haven't been designing a lot. More on that later.

And I have not been enamelling at all for a long, long time. Enamelling needs a time and concentration investment that I haven't been able to put together, and my guess is I won't again until after we have moved in our new place and I've installed my new and hopefully much improved workshop. I refuse to think of this as too bad a thing. I've never been able to attain that single-purpose dedication that is undoubtedly admirable and surely the only way to achieve greatness, but that's ok. I've always been too little butter spread over too large a toast, that's ok, too. Gonna have to be ;)

Meanwhile, yes, new house. I've been posting sort of regularly to my other blog. We've been dedicating our time and effort to home readying and renovating. Still a long way to go. No deadline. Hopefully it won't take many more months. We'll see.

Pim installing insulation

I do not have very good joints, so I cannot work hard as much as I would like to. Pim can, and he does work hard on it, after work most days, and on weekends.

The largest reason why I have very, very little time left is my "new" job. It has been 6 months already! Pim's office is 5 minutes by bike from home, any of them. My commute eats more or less 3 hours of my time everyday (there is a large factor of impredictability… train delays and so on), so rarely can I even come by the house to help a little. So it is mostly weekends for me, and then I do not last very long. Oh well.

So, long commutes means lots of knitting. At least when there is room to sit down, which fortunately is quite often the case, since mostly I travel late (flexible hours), although this means getting home later... and not going to work on the house.

I should have a session of weaving ends one of these days...

Lots of knitting hasn't been meaning lots of designing.

I started designing knitted accessories… less than a year after I first took up knitting, I think. That is not ideal, I guess. I am one of those one step at a time, concentrate on the details kind of people, the ones that can't see the forest for the trees.

I think this is beneficial in some circumstances. One of them is that I do not freak out when attempting complex stuff, because I don't look at the whole picture and try to take it in all at once. I guess that is why I was able to do it, my patterns are in general a bit complex, since I get bored very quickly with simple things. But I believe I am missing something which comes from years of practice. Even stitches may be one, but I do not see progress ;)

So I've been knitting a lot during my commutes, just making up stuff, eyeballing things, and also knitting other people's patterns (and modifying them too, of course). A lot of stash-busting! (paying rent and loan = no funds = stash bust!).

Only very recently I've picked up a design I left unfinished, and I'll be publishing it soon, hopefully. Stay tuned.