I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have personally been off my game since the beginning of the “COVID Times”.
I started off quarantine determined to be focused and fierce. I figured a few weeks - perhaps a couple months - at home together was totally doable. Make it fun! Knit like the wind! Bake! Cook a different dinner everyday! Talk to friends, FaceTime, Zoom….be together apart.
Then came the reality of a raging pandemic with seemingly no end. Temporary isolation become long term isolation. Get togethers and plans for parties and vacation evaporated. School from home became the norm for a year and a half.
Wrapped around the normal ongoing challenges of life it became an endless journey of one foot in front of the other. And I lost my knitting mojo.
Puck was developed before COVID set in. It was tech edited and ready to go just a few months into the pandemic. But I did not publish it. It sat and waited, complete, until a few weeks ago.
I developed a shawl pattern called Vanth in the early days of COVID. It is knit from glorious yarn that I bought at VKLive NYC 2020 just a few weeks before a “flu” infecting people in China became a worldwide tragedy. Vanth is complete, tech edited and ready to go. And has been since May 2020. I love Vanth - but it is grey lace and named for the Etruscan deity that guided the dead. I did not feel I could publish it when the world was shrouded in a cloud of darkness.
After the grey and bleak early months of the pandemic I developed a shawl that is the opposite of Vanth. Bright, cheerful colors, in simple garter as opposed to grey lace. Sunshine Daydreams - an echo of a line from my favorite Grateful Dead song Sugar Magnolia. It has been finished since July 2020, just waiting for a photo shoot.
I simply could not find the traction to bring my projects to completion.
In the fall of 2020 I decided to GET IT TOGETHER and move it! I released Cross Rails which I had developed in the spring of that year. I published Saxum and an annual knit ornament for charity. A vaccine was approved and we could see a path to normalcy.
Which was shattered for my family on December 23, 2020 with the sudden death of my brother in-law. It was unexpected - and not related to COVID. On my needles was a hat I was going to give him the next day.
All of the challenges and heartache of 2020 resulted in 2021 being a year of mourning. I held my family close; we needed to simply be together and help each other through our grief.
I knit in fits and starts. But nothing stuck. I had no motivation to complete the things on my needles. I bought beautiful yarn that was full of inspiration, but there was no motivation. All of my focus was on my family as we struggled to find our own personal peace.
A few weeks ago I felt an inkling of my mojo return. I published Puck. Shortly after followed Sprite, which I had developed in early December 2020. I drafted and cast on a new shawl pattern. I’m drafting two more baby sweater patterns and have plans for another shawl. Oh and a baby blanket too.
I don’t normally write so much or share so much online. I usually maintain a bigger gap between personal and professional. But with the light glinting off the icy trees outside, I felt compelled to write about my journey of the last while and the light I have found again.
So is it game on? I think so. I don’t think it will be a fast paced game of tennis though; more of a game of golf. Quiet, focused on one stroke at a time, and walking with purpose from one place to another.
Thanks for listening. May all of you and yours have peace.