The "Clean the Bathroom Chore of Knitting"

Late yesterday afternoon, I completed the second sleeve of the Linen Print Anna sweater. I had high hopes that this time I finished knitting the pieces of a project, I would dive right in with the real finishing. As one of my commenters so aptly put it a few weeks ago, the "clean the bathroom chore of knitting." Well, that's about how anxious I am to get started on it.

I think I have some sort of performance anxiety with finishing. I must have really taken to heart the admonitions in the back of the Rowan books that "it seems a shame that many beautiful projects are spoilt at the end when finishing" (paraphrased but retained the cute Queen's English-ism of "spoilt".)

The thing is, I'm not a bad finish-er. I do a pretty good job with the old invisible seaming since my class with Leslye Solomon at Stitches Midwest last year. I even have her DVD to pop in if I forget how to do something. I think I really do have performance anxiety issues around it b/c I'm so afraid I'm going to do precisely what the Rowan books say I might.

I was trying to think back to when I have the best luck with sewing my projects together - and actually it's after I've had a glass of wine and I"m a little relaxed and sort of feel devil-may-care about the whole process. I always thought my best time to do this was first thing in the morning after being jacked up on coffee or sugarfree Red Bull, but I think that's actually the best time to knit like a fiend. (See, I'm talking myself out of doing it now.)

Last night I was avoiding this finishing (which really should be easy - it's a raglan pullover where everything is still on holders - how easy can it get, really!) so much that I pulled out my felted flower project that I'd started back around Easter, of all things, and started diligently adding the inside petals. (Oh, and now I'm stuck on that one as I have to thread a ribbon through the I-cord stem and I don't have any ribbons, unless maybe I can use tartalette or something like that? Damn, I think I just came up with a solution to my procrastination on that one.)

And the funny thing is about this finishing performance anxiety is it feeds itself - because you know what I do instead of finishing the project I started? You guessed it, start another project! So right now I have at least seven or eight things to sew together, taunting me from their neat plastic prisons from the Container Store every time I walk into my closet.

But again I'll say what I always say (and how the projects have proliferated since then!) "Know what? This is my long weekend off from work, and I'm going to work on whatever I want. Knitting is my hobby, not my job, and so I'm going to have fun with it. There's enough time in life for things we're not so enthused about (like cleaning the bathroom.)"

So off I go to start another project. Unless someone can motivate me to finish the ones I have.

Postscript: I just took inventory in my closet and discovered I have not six or seven, but in fact TWELVE projects waiting to be sewn. And four that have some knitting left on them to do. That is kind of motivating in itself - if I can finish these, I will have SIXTEEN more finished projects under my belt.