Day Seven: Your Time, Your Place

Where and how do you take time out to knit and/or crochet? Maybe you don’t take time out at all and instead have your needles twirling as you try to juggle a multitude of other tasks with no ‘spare’ time to think of. Maybe you enjoy nothing more than to crochet whilst winding down from a yoga session, chatting with some friends in a nearby cafe.

Whether social or solitary, tell readers about your crafting time and space, and where you either most enjoy (or can simply find a few snatched moments) to turn yarn into something even more beautiful.

I think that the timelapse videos that I shared on Friday tells you pretty much all that you need to know about where and when I do my knitting. Essentially I just keep a project close to hand, but safely out of reach, so that when I spot an opportunity I can just go for it. Sometimes I only get a few stitches done before one little girl or the other desperately needs me right now this second, but often I'm very lucky and they play nicely together for large stretches of time.

Excuse the bum butterfly, we're potty training!

Now that the weather is starting to improve I'm looking forward to a spot of outdoor knitting. On Fridays my parents look after my girls in the morning while I work and then I join them for the afternoon. It's nice to sit in the garden, watch the kiddies play and knit, knowing that there are other people around to keep an eye out for toddler shenanigans if I get too engrossed in my stitches.

When the girls are not home, or Stu is home to keep an eye on them, I usually take the opportunity to do a bit of spinning or sewing. Knitting I can easily do with them around but the spinning wheel is too much of a temptation for them and I don't need them anywhere near the iron. We've pretty much turned the dining room into a bit of a craft nook, with a healthy dose of junk that doesn't fit anywhere else, but it's a reasonable little space and I appreciate not having to put everything away at the end of every session.

Although I don't always get as much uninterrupted time for making as I'd like I'm frequently surprised by how productive I can be. I mostly knit projects stitch by stitch rather than row by row, but I've accepted this and if I waited until I was sure I could complete a complete row then I would never finish anything. Picking my needles up, even if I just knit one stitch, is far more productive than never picking them up at all. I'm sure there's some kind of life lesson in that, but I'm just here to talk about knitting!