I’ve been thinking a lot about discipline lately - you know, that thing that gets you to do the dishes, even though you’d rather work on the sock or read a book?  I don’t have much.  In fact, I’m far less disciplined and far more self-indulgent and impatient than I was as a younger woman.

One of the biggest reflections of this is my knitting.  Not the actual knitting, of which I’m a bit proud, but the many, many projects that get started and then wander off to gather dust while I, like a grasshopper on speed, start another dozen.  Oh one or two may get finished, but the rest will languish, eventually to be frogged or tossed - and it will be a long time before even that happens because I’ll be...class?  That’s right - starting more projects.

Another problem is that if something doesn’t come easily to me, I’m apt to pass it by.  I’ll tell myself I don’t need it, don’t really want it and it was probably sour anyway :) I had this attitude about knitting with double-pointed needles.  Socks?  Feh - who cares about knitting socks...I don’t need no steenking socks!  Lace?  Beautiful, lovely - work of art, really.  Me?  No, ham-handed, fumble-fingered me could never manage lace - but thank you very much for asking…

And the Universe is funny about all of this - almost perverse :) Have trouble finishing projects?  Think the powers that be would bless you with a craving for small things like hats?  Mitts?  Baby booties?  No, you’re obsessions include shawls, blankets, car cozies....  Afraid of lace?  The Universe trots out the most beautiful examples of the art - pieces that should be hanging in the Louvre - and tempts you till you’re ready to stick your knitting needles in your eyes just to stop the torment!

And then it shows you lace with beads.

And then you know your crafting soul is totally and irrevocably lost…

Those of you who’ve been reading this blog for a while, may remember that I have worked knitting with beads before.  There’s the Little Beaded Bag.  That project involved stringing all the needed beads on your chosen yarn before the knitting even began and then utilizing a slip-stitch technique to place the beads.  This isn’t difficult at all.  The only problem with this technique is that while it may be perfectly fine for something like a dice bag, it’s not going to work for something finer.  Stringing beads on fine yarn will do nothing but shred your yarn and the slip-stitch placement technique is too loose and not really strong enough to hold beads in place on a somewhat delicate fabric.

So then what?

The thing I had been avoiding, of course :) The thing I told myself I couldn’t do and therefore didn’t really want to do.

The technique isn’t that difficult.  You use a crochet hook - a small enough one to go through the hole of your bead.  You pick up a bead with the hook and insert the business end of the hook into the stitch on your left needle.  Then you pull the loop of yarn through the bead, replace the loop on the needle and then knit the stitch.  This fixes the bead much more firmly than the slip-stitch method and is more stable because both loops of the stitch go through the bead.

The problem for me is that I knit right-handed but I crochet left-handed.  I finally realized that in order to make this work, I was going to have to manipulate the crochet hook with my right hand.  So, Friday night I sat down with my tools and gave it a try.  The yarn is fingering weight and the beads are size 6.  I needed a size 12 crochet hook (very, very small) to get through the holes in the beads and that meant that manipulating the yarn with it was almost impossible.  However, I tried it that way many times - pick up bead, insert hook into stitch and try to draw the yarn back through the bead.  Each time, I split the yarn because the hook couldn’t catch the whole thickness and wound up with half the yarn on each side of the bead - a mess, in other words.

Then it occurred to me to try it another way.  Instead of attempting to draw the yarn through the bead, I tried drawing the bead over the end of the hook and down onto the stitch.  Okay, use the hook, pick up the bead and insert it through the stitch.  Then, holding the stitch firmly down on the hook with my left hand, I then used my right thumb(nail) to scoot the bead over the yarn, off the hook and down onto the stitch.

That worked!

As it turns out, using the hook in my right hand wasn’t a big issue because I wasn’t really crocheting - just using it to hold the yarn and the bead.

I was slack-jawed with amazement.  I had tried this technique many times before and gotten nowhere with it.  All I had ever achieved was shredded yarn - and shredded patience.

It really, really worked!

I was so dumbfounded that when I finished the first practice piece, I started another one…

Back to what I was saying in the beginning…

I have become lazy and self-indulgent.  There’s nothing wrong with designing and executing the ideas in your own head - but not when you’re using it as an excuse not to have to deal with standard patterns, methods and techniques. 

I am going to finish the projects I have under way.  I’m thinking specifically of the Kimono Scarf here because now that I’ve seen how the stitch pattern works, and how the multi-colored yarn and the pattern play together - it’s gotten a little boring :) This is the point where I would normally lose interest and start another project.  But I’m no going to do that - I’m going to keep working on the scarf until it’s done.  I am also going to try some other patterns - other than the ones in my head, I mean.  And I am going to try very hard not to mess with them until they are something entirely other than what the originator intended.  I will probably always be more interested in expressing what’s in my own mind and heart than reproducing what someone else’s dream might have been.  However doing my own thing is different than not doing someone else’s thing and I need to work on that :)

Ev - that baby jacket?  Frogged…

And about ignoring things you think you can’t do?  The problem for me was that some part of me really did want to do them.  I would tell myself I didn’t want to make socks and then find myself with double-points in hand trying to figure out how to “join”.  And I told myself that beaded knitting was fussy, slow and unappealing…

I may have lied :)

Oh, and about the Universe being perverse?  I found this Beading with Needle Tutorial this morning :)