I have taken procrastination to a new level. No, not with my writing…with my knitting. For the last few days I have been knitting swatches like a madwoman for a knitting workshop I took today. As my dear friend,Eileen Cook, so helpfully reminded me yesterday,”You’ve known about this seminar for THREE months.” Of course I have! Which is why I am surprised that a fabulous knitter like Eileen did not offer to do these swatches for me a long time ago!

Last January, I decided to take up knitting because I needed something to do after a full day of writing that didn’t involve words. I’d noticed that a lot of writers liked to knit, so why not me? I got a great book and taught myself to knit. For the most part, I’ve done pretty well on my own, but I signed up for a class called Fear of Finishing at the local yarn store (mostly to figure out how to fix my glaring mistakes, but also to teach me how to sew all the sweater pieces together), and one of the things you had to do before the class was knit three swatches. I started these on Thursday. They take (me) about 2-5 hours each, depending on the size. But you can’t really knit continuously or your arm will fall off.

By yesterday afternoon I was so sick of knitting swatches that I actually WROTE all afternoon just to avoid having to knit. I hadn’t anticipated it would help my writing that way! But wait, it gets better, and Eileen will appreciate this hilarity. After doing about a zillion things on my huge to-do list yesterday, including knitting off and on, I popped a Perry Mason DVD into the player, turned the TV on, and sat down to knit the last 16 rows of my last swatch. Perry’s theme music was still playing when the power went out.

Because I live on an island, and the power company gets here by ferry, we were out for the night. Yes…I had to knit by candlelight! And personally, I don’t know how people have done it for all these years because after ten rows I was practically blind. I had to do the last 11 on the ferry this morning, but when I walked in to the class, I was done! So if nothing else, knitting has proved to me that I can and will meet my deadline! Even if I have to do it by candlelight!