If it takes ten hours to complete something, it will take those ten hours, whether you spend an hour a day for ten days or two hours a day for five days. The days spent changes but not the total time. When you have many projects on the go at once, it feels good when you finish them but you are not actually finishing more projects than if you had just one project at a time. It just feels that way especially at the end of the year when I am making an effort to finish projects.
I think I have mentioned before that I don’t know when I became a multi-project person but I know I have said many times that my actual number of WIPs always exceeds my ideal number of WIPs. When the number of books I was reading started to become as bad as the number of projects I was working on, I decided I needed to retrain my brain.
I used have just two books in progress, one audio, one regular, but then a non-fiction book got added and then I started to read a different book in bed. And then there were other excuses for more books. So in April I decided to read just one book at a time (audio excepted). It felt good but strange to work my through my partially read books. And when we went away a couple of weeks ago it was easy to stick to the one book rule and I want to keep it that way. Except it is my life and I can impose any rules I want. For example, the non-fiction book I am reading is heavy with quite a few pictures so not suitable for reading in bed or while knitting, so it is an exception. The other two exceptions are when I have to read a book for bookclub and when the book I am reading, for whatever reason, can only be read in short bursts.
Having easily applied my reading rule I decided to apply a knitting rule. I had finished a project at the end of April and started a new project on 1 May which became my main project although I did not take it on vacation. It was an easy project and easily finished within the month. So I came up with a simple knitting rule. One easy project, one not-so-easy project and one crochet project. Although, no surprise, there are plenty of exceptions I have given myself. Blankets to use up left over yarn don’t count, the yearlong socks project doesn’t count as long as I work on them each month, the two projects that were on the needles at the start of the year don’t count (one I have deliberately turned into yearlong project), the Pi shawl doesn’t count as long as I finish it in time. Gift knitting doesn’t count.
I have an easy project on the needles that I started on 1 January, I have a crochet project I started on 3 May and I will cast on a pair of socks tomorrow to cover the not-so-easy part.
I’m sure there will be times when I break all these rules but, although strange at first, it does feel good to simplify.
And here is the project that restored almost monogamy. The yarn I had bought in the closing down sale specifically for this project. It was only 30% off, so as for the crochet project I wanted to get this on the needles quickly. Although as DH pointed out it only mattered if the yarn was still available when the discounts were bigger. (It wasn’t.) I was lucky to get the pattern for free when it first came out.The finished item is soft and squidgy.
The yarn is Moonshine by Juniper Moon Yarn in five different colours and the pattern is Tadasana.
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