If my life were a movie on Lifetime, I think this summer may have been the second act where Our Fearless Heroine becomes buried under the Various Setbacks that plague heroines in these things. My diagnosis of RA has been compounded by The Doctors wanting to revisit Crohn’s as an explaination for the fact that I am technically malnourished even though I am a middle-class person. My body seems to take all the minerals and most of the vitamins from the food I eat and turn them into kidney stones instead of body parts. Those kidney stones have had me in and out of the hospital and urologists’ offices since late May. And then our sewage backed up again, leaving foul matter inside our tub and shower. It’s just been gross and tiring. And I’ve been lying around on the verge of depression with the whole “I can’t handle this!!!” mantra on constant-whine mode in the back of my head. Crap and tests and pain and the vision of wearing a pump permanently attached to my innards to give me vitamins like some sort of Star Trek experiment makes me frustrated.
And then I’ve been watching my husband take to stained-glass as though he was born to do glasswork, turning our garage into a studio and acquiring all the necessary tools from eBay. In three weeks we went from Cycle Shop to Glass Studio and I could feel the burning in my fingers, the itch behind my eyes.
In all the woe of pain I realise that I have missed–sorely–creating things. I was a knitter of some skill and polish Before Disease and watching him delve into artisanship made me miss the fibers and the art of topology. I missed bending straight lines into curves and clothing.
I’ve been knitting off and on since diagnosis, but I tend to get frustrated with the new regimen of “work 15 minutes and take a break”. But it’s come to me lately that the new regimen is better than no regimen, especially when your soul craves creation.
So I embarked on a new challenge. Not only Knitting, but Mobius Knitting. 
That twisty sort of knitting that has become increasingly popular in the last three years. There are several ways to do it, and without getting technical I will say they boil down into three types: Easy, Kind of Hard and Wicked.
I am doing the Wicked. Because I want to make something and i want the path to be hard and the end to be beautiful. I want to look at something I don’t initially understand and pick it apart until I am a master of the mystery. Sure, to the world it’s a scarf. To me it’s a sort of salvation.
And how’s it going? Well, on Saturday I read through the instructions ten times, gave up twice and then went to bed cranky. (Missing my friends’ birthday party to attend to sewage may have had something to do with the crankyfactor.) Sunday afternoon I plopped myself and my stubbornness in front of YouTube and watched a video through until I got the gist of it. Three hours later I was underway. And today I’m knitting and I’m happy.
I know that feeling. Even though my job is creating, I still get the strong urge to create recreationally (hmm….). Often I’m indiscriminate in what I want to create too. I just want to paint something, or build something, or bake something or make some music or whatever.
That’s a beautiful cowl. Are you using the same color and yarn, or substituting a different one? And you’re making my fingers itch to grab my needles, too. Lord have mercy, I wish I could knit more. Good luck with the pattern, and happy knitting!
That’s lovely. I never could knit, despite having one grandmother who did it professionally. And I haven’t been able to take on anything that requires hand detail for decades now. So I am lost in admiration of your fighting spirit, almost as much as I will be of your cowl.
Oh, man, I know all about the plumbing woes. I’ve been through so many of those. And kudos to you for being able to knit. I’m woefully inadequate as an artisan. My hands just won’t work properly. I do, however, work at an art gallery once a week, and I love selling artwork. Last Saturday, I sold a stained glass piece, and I was so excited–and nervous, too. It was the first I’d sold, and I was sore afraid I wouldn’t wrap it properly and it would shatter before the customer got it home. I live through others’ artwork, you see.
I should have explained that the cowl I’m working on ISN’T the one pictured. I just needed a visual example. I believe that one is one of the Easy ones, knitted flat, twisted and sewn. I should’ve found a better example of what I’m doing, which is a double-cast on with a 180degree twist. It is in a lavender alpaca yarn. And it’s my first go, what I always think of as the “understanding” project, where I learn the play of the yarn.
The next one will be the “perfecting” where I take what I learned in Understanding and tweak it.
Then after that comes the Designing, where I work with the patterns I prefer to come up with what I truly want. Since I prefer either cables or lace patterns, and Mobius designs have to be reversable I will most likely end up with a lace.
Alpaca is soooooo soft, yet beware! It sheddeth like unto the proverbial byotch. Lesson learned from knitting a gorgeous nursing shawl, and then having to not use it for its intended purpose because I didn’t want the baby to end up with hair in his milk.
I agree: gorgeous scarf/cowl/thingie.
Is there a crocheted version of the pattern? (I guess I could google it, of course.)
Alpaca: swoon.