In the round

I really do have things to blog about right now, but because my digital camera was stolen (again!!) I don't have the photos to download yet (I'm using little disposable cameras, and I have to get them to walmart or someplace to get a CD made).


In the meantime, I wanted to share a passage from a book I'm currently enjoying/obsessing over. The Gentle Art of Domesticity: Stitching, Baking, Nature, Art & the Comforts of Home by Jane Brockett is a really lovely book based on her lovely blog called yarnstorm. The passage I want to quote really hit home since I sometimes feel that everything I do is on an endless loop:


I sometimes find myself going round in circles. One week comes around after the next with another revolution of days. I make circular cookies for the children to recycle into energy and good humor when they come home on a Friday. I sew buttons onto school shirts. I peel apples for a tart. I wind yarns into soft balls. I peer into cups of tea and pry open cans of golden syrup.


And I am hypnotized by knitting socks. Once a sock has been cast on... I adore the mindlessness of going round and round like a hamster in a wheel. I use self-striping yarns... Much of the fun comes from seeing new stripe after new stripe begin, so that after a while this simple knitting becomes a stack of brightly colored hula hoops.

The only way to knit a sock in the round is to keep coming back to your starting point. But, almost imperceptibly, progress is made. It's a pattern, yes, but it's not really a circle, it's a spiral and all the stitches and rows, like days and weeks, are linked to form an unbroken chain. We can think we are getting nowhere with the cyclical nature of domesticity, and yet all the time, as with sock-knitting, we are moving on to a new stitch or a new day and then, suddenly, a whole new row or color...