2KCBWDAY7 - Fun Time

2KCBWDAY7 Day seven: 3rd April. Your knitting and crochet time.

Write about your typical crafting time. When it is that you are likely to craft – alone or in more social environments, when watching TV or whilst taking bus journeys. What items do you like to surround yourself with whilst you twirl your hook like a majorette’s baton or work those needles like a skilled set of samurai swords. Do you always have snacks to hand, or are you a strictly ‘no crumbs near my yarn!’ kind of knitter.

Day late, dollar short. Eh. Life.

Here we are at the end of another round of the fun and lovely community activity that is Knitting and Crochet Blog Week. So quickly too. Alas.

So. Last year there was a topic about actual physical place-of-crochet. This topic is broader in scope but the response begins in the same place – my chair in the living room. No photo. Not ever. I’m rather embarrassed by the state of things around here these days and prefer to wallow alone in my shame. Actually, no photos at all for this one. I’m afraid that we are off another whirlwind adventure down my the foaming stream of my dizzying consciousness. Bring your Dramamine, everybody?

I crochet while watching TV. In fact, I often keep the ole boob tube on for the background noise alone. Why not music? I don’t know really. We just didn’t sit around listening to music in my youth. More a conversation, TV and play with the cats and dogs and other sundry critters type family. There were records and radios and we all loved music but that wasn’t the real focus of our entertainment. Except for physical things like cook-outs and cleaning house, where the beat made the mood and enhanced the activity.

I did listen to music more often while in college and grad school. Usually in my bedroom at a desk where a TV always felt rather out of place. So I studied with music playing. Drove the inevitable long distances commuting to schools and jobs with music too. College was and hour commute daily, each way. Grad school wasn’t at first but eventually it too was an hour in traffic. Hmm. Then most, if not all, of my real grown-up jobs were long commutes. Hey, culinary school too. Shoot, even my first out-patient treatment center was a long commute. Lucky I guess. No wonder I was always so tired and cranky.

And with all of that driving, I listened to the car radio. Maybe I equate the radio playing with the drudgery of endless, mindless hours at the wheel and aching, bubbling, enraging frustration of dealing with big city long distance traffic. I don’t know that I can relax listening to music anymore. I haven’t really tried. I just stick with the TV.

Daytime programming is nice and monotonous. Nothing too exciting to drag my attention away from the hook. The white sound is important, but the visual stimulation is also quite helpful. All the changing patterns and colors of standard TV broadcasting decorate the periphery of my sight as I hunch over my hook and thread. Prime time can be a bit problematic though. Sometimes I have to put things aside and focus on something with a unique plot or irresistible character interaction. Funny enough, when I stop and think about it, there isn’t a lot offered prime time these days that will make me put down the crochet. I like that term. Interestingly enough, I heard that about a TV show once: they added a young, hot guy to the cast to get the girls to "put down their knitting" and some hot girls to get "Dad out of the garden". Brtitish show, kind of obviously.

Anyway, summer reruns are coming and I can crochet to my heart’s content while only marginally responding to the TV. Have been on basic cable for only six months now, but it didn’t take long to find out that daytime cable is rerun hell … or crochet Eden depending on your mindset. This all works for me. Keeps my hands hooking and my synapses firing. In fact the only glitch in thoroughly enjoying my crochet time comes from the daily, often seemingly hourly, wrestling match with the cat.

Like most cats, Wulfie is an attention whore. The sight of hook in hand is his signal that the human is nicely fluffed up and awaiting his sprawling presence. In other words, he wants to sit on my chest and will squeeze his fuzzy little head under hook and thread and up between my hands completely blocking my line of vision. And if I’m not fast enough, I’ll lose hook, thread and any other small accouterments I may have temporarily stored on my shirt under a solid 108 degree wall of fluffily annoying catness. Of course, even if I can clear the deck fast enough, I will have to put the work away anyway and attend to his satanic majesty or I’ll get kitty-claw pin cushioned to death as he tries to get comfortable on my person. Remind me why it is that I think I like cats?

Ah. Cats and crochet. They go together like Spring and flowers, hearth and home, tar and feathers…

Hook On!
C