My friends, I have cast on fever. I cast on yet another new project, another baby cardigan for B. I couldn’t help myself, and after a week of resisting the urge, I had to follow the dopamine and cast on. I am a notorious project starter and only sometime project finisher. I blame my very ADHD brain for this quality. I just love the thrill of picking out a pattern, finding the perfect yarn, and all the planning that comes with it. I seriously LOVE the planning. The finishing? Eh, not the same rush.
But Kailee, I hear you say, don’t you have a self-imposed deadline for finishing your own sweater? Why don’t you do that first? I have several arguments against this. First, I have several quantities of baby sweater yarn that I need to use before they won’t be enough yarn to make B a proper sweater anymore. Kids grow FAST and I am a slow knitter. Second, this yarn is so pretty. Just look at it. And finally, B wore her sweater to daycare for the first time and her teachers were so excited to see the finished product that I got a clear dopamine rush and immediately cast on another cardigan after drop off, my own sweater be damned. (I am an actual lawyer and understand these arguments are flimsy at best, but look at how pretty this yarn is and be distracted).
So given my history you’d think I would have an entire closet full of unfinished projects. You’d be absolutely correct, except that it is a big storage bin of unfinished projects not a closet. Just ask my husband how long I’ve been working on his socks (the answer is 7 years, since we started dating, and I’m almost done, I swear). Part of the problem is that if I’m not consistently working on something, and I mean, it has to be totally visible, I simply forget it exists. I have projects I don’t even remember starting or what they were supposed to be. Another part of the problem is my brain operates in a very “If you give a mouse a cookie” fashion. I start something, it reminds me that I have to do another thing, and so on, until I’m somewhere else entirely, leaving a half finished trail of tasks behind me.
To be clear, I am absolutely on medication for ADHD. Sadly, it is not a magical cure and it still takes a lot of executive control for me to keep my life running. Sometimes this means I forget to buy milk but remembered all of my work commitments. Sometimes it means I have no idea when I bought this yarn or what it’s for. C’est la vie. But it is something I’m working on, even just to help myself financially with not spending so much on yarn and then forgetting what I meant to do with it. I instituted a new rule this year for buying yarn: every purchased skein must have an assigned project. I keep track of which project and which yarn I plan to use in Ravelry as a way to keep myself accountable and remember where I was going with a yarn purchase. It’s been very helpful and I’ve completed a lot more projects this year, simply because I had a plan written down somewhere.
We’re only a few weeks out from Rheinbeck (the Rheinbeck Sheep & Wool Festival in Upstate New York — this deserves an explanatory post of its own) and I’m really hoping to have my sweater done by then. If not my sweater, then my Andy Shawl (which will not happen if I keep ignoring it). Here’s hoping I don’t get even more distracted than I already am so I can actually finish one of the two. Feel free to comment, I’d love to know what’s on your needles!
B needs all the sweaters. Cast on.
The pic of Stanley is iconic 😂 Also, I relate to this very much, as a fellow serial whatever-kind-of-project starter