What was I doing, again?

by Meg Dedolph

If you are the kind of person who casts on a project and then knits happily along until it’s finished before you pick your next project out, then this post is not for you. (May I instead recommend “Clark and Division,” a mystery by Naomi Hirahara, set in the Japanese-American community in Chicago during WWII?)

For the rest of us, how many times have you done the thing where you start a project, and then you put it aside and then, several weeks, or months, or, um, years, later, you return to it, only to have no idea what Past You was doing?

This plagues me, not only in knitting, but in quilting and sewing. I start something, life gets in the way, and by the time I return to it, it’s a mystery what I was doing in the first place.

My partner, who works in computers, says there’s a thing called “commenting your code,” which programmers do to prevent Future Them staring at their laptops in puzzlement, wondering what Past Them was thinking.

I try. 

I really do. 

For a while, I was commenting my quilts with straight pins and sticky notes covered with scribbled remarks about what book the block pattern was in, or what size square I was making, but that habit didn’t make it into my knitting life.

So, insofar as New Year’s resolutions get made chez moi, here’s mine: I’m going to use Ravelry, or a nice little notebook in my knitting basket, to write down things like the size sweater I cast on, or just the name of the pattern I’m using.

In the meantime, does anyone know what this triangular lace shawl with a sort of leafy lace edging is? Past Me is wondering.