I had a nice, if unintentional, break from knitting, designing, and social media generally. I wish I hadn’t, in the sense that I wish I could be on all the time, but it might be time to accept that my energy levels come in 6-month waves, and I should probably start making plans for another similar “vacation” in about 6 months!
What did I do while away? Honestly…mostly stress about the US slip-slip-slipping further into a wh*te supremacist nightmare and then avoid said stress by playing video games. Stress can also make me slip back into bad eating-disordery thought patterns, which I don’t love, but I have an OK handle on that. I’ve had a pair of Alba socks on the needles for over 2 months, and was FINALLY able to push through and get the second sock bound off yesterday, so that’s the entire extent of my knitting during my downtime.
To be honest, it was hard to get myself back into the designing mindset simply because I don’t think I have a good handle on it yet. I love coming up with ideas and making them real, but get hung up on the selling part. It requires expenditure (paying for tech editing, for example) and marketing (endless social media posts, blog posts, emails), which require both regular effort to create and maintain, and emotional effort to react to. I have a tendency to go all-or-nothing on endeavors, so I get frustrated when a pattern isn’t an instant success and sometimes wonder, why can’t this business totally replace my day job already?? This isn’t a fish for compliments, by the way, just an explanation for why I get stuck between enjoying the publishing journey and feeling like a failure for not being a knitting millionaire. (If that statement made you laugh, trust me, me too lol)
What am I working on now? Well, I unexpectedly found myself waiting in the car for 3 hours while my partner had retina surgery, so I have a shawl for waiting in the works. Super Sock Scarefest has started to build their schedule for 2022, so I’ve got a fun pattern in the works for that. I have another sock design I was hoping to get out during Pride month that, uh, did not go out during Pride month, but that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate it later in the year!
I have other stuff on deck that I enjoyed looking at in my brainstorming notebook, but to avoid overloading myself I’ll hold onto those for another day (or month).
The header image for this post is a lovely-smelling rose bush I got in an attempt to make myself take care of the yard again. So far it’s still alive!