Earning Your Knitting, Part 2, Or Knitting While Cleaning

In this week's Knitting Interruptions File, we find weekend visitors (wonderful interruption) and sheetrock work (yucky interruptions) converging, so that I was actually required to clean the house instead of work on Jules during every free moment (have I mentioned how knitting monogamously on a white -- OK, ecru -- knitting project is about to make me truly crazy?? T-minus four days until MIL's arrival. Must. Finish. Jules.). But I have discovered a way to knit while cleaning. Well, not actually knitting -- no enchanted needles here -- but listening to knitting through the magic of Podcasting! See, friends, we can earn our knitting by cleaning the house while listening to knitters talk knitting!

If you haven't begun listening to knitting podcasts, I highly recommend it. I now clean the house with my iPod on, listening to Cast-On and KnitCast, and have a sparkling house to boot! You don't need an iPod to listen, just stream it on your computer.

Knitting is worthy of your time, but spackle dust on your floor is just disgusting.


And as a special XRK Bonus, here is what I posted in response to Cast-On's Brenda's request about Stash.



Stash, to me, is like buying your school supplies in September. As a student, and then as a teacher, there was something so hopeful and full of potential in that trip to the stationery store. That new-folder smell, those pencils with complete erasers. That special excitement when a new school supply was requested by your teacher -- I remember my first jar or rubber cement, and felt an incredible thrill when I first acquired both a protractor and compass.

Those new school supplies, unwrinkled and intact, that held the potential of the best school year ever -- no more lost homework with this Trapper Keeper! And now I get to learn geometry like my older brothers -- I must really be growing up! Or as a teacher, you know that this is the year you will light the lamp of creativity in your students, since you have purchased wonderful bound journals for each and every one of them.

These unused school supplies precede all bad grades, lost assignments, and indifferent students. As does your stash. Stash is that potentially perfect project, lying in wait. Stash is what you have before you forget to account for selvedges or rip that same three inches out for the third time.

Stash is a knitters potential. It promises to erase all the past disasters or uninspired projects, the bad yarn choices, the gauge errors. In my stash, my Manos says this beautiful yarn will make a beautiful garment, and my Noro says this time, your sweater will fit you perfectly. My sock stash promises hand-knitted socks for every day of the week, my Blue Heron, the shawl of my dreams.