All you can do is stitch about it

Sometimes all you can do is stitch.

I got a canvas a couple of weeks ago and have been working on some needlepoint mini-projects.   Using up all my threads and practicing my tent stitch, half cross stitch and slanted gobelin stitch.   And to be clear here,  needlepoint is not crewel  nor cross….it is worked on an open canvas and with wool yarn which is called Persian yarn which is different then tapestry wool  and is for a canvas that is bigger then the one I am working.  And bigger means that you have less holes  the bigger it is.   Go figure.  A 24 count canvas is ridiculously tiny and I would need a magnifying glass with light.  I am stitching on an 18.   And if you are a fiber junky, it is all about the threads and the count.

To be clear,  the work pictured is not mine… I am not that far along on my sampler.  And I am finding that I am running out of this or that color in the middle of trying to work on some new stitch. Which is just fine.  The point of stitching is to sometimes occupy your head with detailed work rather than detailed thinking, which I am quite good at.  I am a professional over-thinker and re-thinker.  Sometimes my funny little brain is good like that and sometimes it works against me.  And so needlework can focus me because I actually have to pay attention to the canvas and find the right whole to poke the needle though.

When I knit it is often so automatic that I don’t have to think about it at all  and I can get into a mind-field pretty easily and before you know it I have stepped on a some sort of a trigger and boom.   I am off over-thinking and spinning like a top.   My grandfather Arthur Perry used to say “leave it lay were Jesus flang it” and I try to remind myself of that from time to time.

Some thinking is best done in the sub-conscious mind, where what ever vexes you will eventually work itself out to a solution, or at least you won’t be wasting your time and energy festering in it.   Festering never helps no one.  Festering tends to include griping as well.  And frankly, no matter how big your problems seem, or how completely consuming they are to you,  everyone else has life going on too  and griping rarely produces peace. If anything,  griping produces isolation.   Venting is a small blow off and is healthy, but if  you are venting all the time about  the same thing,  then it is festering. Festering tends to be like picking a scab, the dang thing is itchy and distracting, but if you pick it, it will only bleed and take longer to heal and… yup, you got it… leave a scar.

Some issues, some wounds, need a bit of cleaning before they can heal… but over-thinking rarely produces a clean and simple peace.  The  true answers always come with some time and some prayer and eventually everything will sugar out.    And so as much as I have a bunch of knitting projects to do and certainly a ton of yarn to actually spin up, now is not the time for that.  Now is the time to do my handiwork.

 

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