antidote for hysteria?

cozypants

The visual tranquility of teapot, artificial flowers and colorful/cushy finished socks is slightly not a true picture of my life. As November 1st looms, I find myself preparing for a non-stop busy time that may include a trip east and/or southwest, and will certainly overlap into early January. Not due to the coming holidays and assorted family birthdays, although they play a part, but due to a plethora of drop dead deadlines.

resolved:
this will be the last year I do the Yuletide Craft Fair because on top of all the other deadlines I now face production! On one hand it's sheer insanity. On the other it's the push I need to finish UFOs. Things that I've lost interest in will inevitably interest someone else. This I've learned through the years. And isn't it better to part with what I no longer love so it can be infused with new love? For example (and I think I broke a procrastination record here), last night I finished a pair of socks started approximately ten years ago. That's what I said, dear reader. Ten years!

Here's what happened. There is a yarn shop in town called The Yarn Shop. In the past (two owners ago) I often traded knitting samples for yarn. I'd discovered socks and loved the new self-patterning yarns. Most at that time came from Regia. This one was called Special Effekts. I knitted a one sock sample that sold lots of yarn, and completely lost the desire to knit the second. A few years months later, the shop changed hands. I reclaimed the sock and tossed it into a storage box where it languished until my recent declutter campaign. Not only was the sock there - looking quite fresh and perky - but so was the yarn - all neatly bundled in a ziplock bag. The very fact that so much time had elapsed and the project was still viable, propelled me to finish. Voila! It's actually quite nice and will make it's belated debut at the Fair. This started an insane trend and now there are three more sufo's clamoring for new life in the light.

"a distinct virtue"
A miniature book published by Running Press around the time I made that striped sock, contains quotes and historical facts about knitting. I don't remember how I acquired the book, but it resurfaced with the sock. Aside from facts about Eleanor Roosevelt's bulging knitting bag, and that the Archbishop of Canterbury got involved (quote above), I wonder if this still works:

The quiet, even, regular motions of knitting
were prescribed as an antidote for nervousness
and hysteria in the nineteenth century