Security Blanket Shawl

I wish I could be always knitting.

It has been very frustrating going back to work and school after the holiday break. I spent almost all my time knitting and researching knit projects and had gotten fairly used to it. So this week when I had to return to the real world, it has been hard to find as much time as I’d like to knit.

I carry my knitting everywhere with me. I did this with all sorts of things as a child. I would cart around an entire stack of new books. I can never quite recall what the idea behind it was. Did I think somehow that I would finish all 4 of them and need that fifth on the 30 minute trip to the store with my mom? More likely, I think I just liked to look at them and know they were there.

The bundle of knitting that I cart to and from work, never finding a chance to work on, serves a similar purpose. It reminds me that I have something to look forward to. It reminds me of the peace and comfort that await me when I can find the time. It’s sort of a security blanket. Or in this case shawl.

My co-workers have gotten used to the odd jar-o-knitting sitting around my desk or in the case of December’s pre-Christmas knitting insanity, projects being worked on in the odd bits of time between programs starting up (my office uses ancient machines and it can take a good 10 minutes to open GIS). the Yarntainer was a novelty for awhile, but has faded to normal.

It frustrates me that I can’t seem to find the time to knit during the day, but it somehow comforts me that it’s there. I know that should some unforeseen event cause me to wait or have to kill time, I will have just the thing to do. This has rarely happened of course, but it doesn’t stop me from bringing it anyway. And it creates an even greater anticipation for when I actually do get time to knit. It is more satisfying when I finally get to sit down, open the container and pull out the soft cozy project and lose myself in concentrating on a pattern moving through my hands.