The Tortoise and the Hare of Knitting

I've always been an "instant gratification" kinda woman. I like to see instant progress when I tackle a task or start a new project. I think that's why, when I was a single Mom on a tight budget, I used to love to mow my lawn. Here in Florida, especially in the summer, the lawn is halfway to your knees a week after cutting it. Especially after a bad day practicing law (and there were LOTS of those), I'd come home and fire up the lawn mower. With the first swipe down the lawn, I could see progress. And with every additional pass, I felt the thrill of coming quite noticeably closer to my goal. My neighbors got used to me coming home after dark, angling my car on the driveway and then mowing my lawn lit by the headlights of my car. And the best part was that 3 or 4 days later, I could do it all over again.

Now I knit to relax and I have to say it's a lot less sweaty an endeavor than yard work. But I still have an instant gratification issue and it really raises its ugly head when I'm deciding which of the Deep South Knitting book projects I choose to work on that day. My Smoky Mountain Afghan is knit from the outside edge in, starting with hundreds and hundreds of cast-on stitches. The first 30 rows were really slow going, but as the rows decrease heading toward the center, each row gets faster and faster. So I'm less than halfway through, "row-wise," but really in the home stretch "stitch-wise."

On the other hand, I'm also working on a felted Mardi Gras hobo bag that is totally seamless and starts with a Turkish cast-on and then goes up and out from there. Every row gets longer and longer but the first 30 rows pretty much flew by. But now I'm 50 rows in and the rows just get longer and longer. Although I'm halfway done if you just count rows, if you count stitches I have a loooong way to go.

So instead of choosing and then knitting, I'm blogging about choosing and knitting hoping that somehow the act of writing it down will help me choose. Hmmmm -- still undecided. Maybe I'll just keep thinking about it until cocktail hour?