masterpiece knitting

A,
It's the first day of classes, I'm here at the office and have hardly anything to work on at the moment, so I thought I'd blog a post.

Remember that yarn that got lost in the mail? It came! So exciting! But, then again, I'm starting to think that it was my own mail box stupidity that kept me from getting the package in the first place. We've got one of these community mailboxes, and I guess when you get a package they give you a key to open up the package compartment. Not that I knew any of this. Nor should I have expected this either, seeing as a package was previously delivered to our house, but in a different manner. A different annoying manner which involved me having to drive to the post office. I like this mailbox compartment idea much better, only I wish I had known about it earlier.

So I am making socks with this new yarn. Socks take two. No variegated colors any more. Just nice socks. Azure socks. I'd show you a picture, but I'm at the office. No camera on me at the moment.

And the socks got me to thinking. Did you ever read the American Girl series? How about the Molly books? As I recall, Molly was in some group that was knitting socks for the soldiers in WWII. Only Molly didn't want to make socks. They were too hard. She rallied everyone together, and they each knit a simple square, stitched them all together, and sent a blanket overseas instead. Isn't this interesting? What does this suggest to our knitting community? To give up on the hard projects and take the easy way out? Or does it suggest that we should work at something that we love, irregardless of how simple it may seem?

I am conflicted. For one, knitting seems at the core to be a simple sport. It is repetitious. It is soothing. It is rhythmic. It's a step back in technology to a craft that has been around for, what? Hundreds? Thousands of years? So why is it that every project that I seem to want to knit is complicated, impressive, and showy? (not that I'm claiming anything impressive, just the yearning to be impressive) Is this counter to the idea of a simplistic knitting craft? What do you think?

I have a new goal; to simplify my knitting, at least for the coming semester. Take on some stockinette or simple ribbing, or easy stitch pattern. Something that is truly mindless that I can take to class and never have to bother to look at. Yet somehow this seems more difficult to me than the proposal of tackling some complicated masterpiece. I don't know why this is.

We will see how this works out. I suppose the solution is to have multiple projects at once, but it is so difficult for me to put projects on hold.

K