wanderpost

For three days I've mentally composed but I haven't had the time to sit and write a post. Anyone expecting a reply email from me may have noticed this already. Typical work and end-of-semester stuff, no big deal. Just zero free time.

This quote is from my cataloging class.

There are two types of technologies: holistic technologies and prescriptive technologies. Holistic technologies are those that allow the individual to control the procedures and processes. The best example I can think of right now is cooking. When we cook a meal we have a great deal of individual control. We can choose what to cook; we can modify recipes, change ingredients, quantities, temperatures, and so on. Prescriptive technologies, on the other hand, transfer the control from the individual to an external agent. With prescriptive technologies there is no room for creative thinking or modifications. The implications of turning a holistic technology into a prescriptive one...

Pattern-wise, I know that most of us are not above tweaking the occasional set of directions, either because something is senseless, or just freakin stupid. We get all holistic without even thinking about it (unless its lace, and that's just different). With stash, I think that most of us knitters have more projets in the queue than we're going to get to anytime soon. For me, the stash has become prescriptive. Oppressively prescriptive.

This stash notion has been bothering me of late. Two people I love--who don't see each other, don't talk to each other and probably wouldn't hang out in the same bomb shelter in a nuclear holocaust--have asked rather probing questions about it. My dear husband, who's been supportive enough to purchase yarn stashing containers without me even asking, looked at me oddly when I said I'd finally figured out what to do with some brown Cascade 220 that didn't fit what it was bought for:



"You're casting on another project?" he asked in shock. Equally in shock I answered that I had finished not one, but three in the last week. Granted they were washcloths, but I had finished them. Then this week, my friend Lisa made a passing reference to my habit of buying stuff ("and dammit, stop buying yarn without a purpose"). Its enough to make one stop and think a bit.

But back to the quote. I don't even remember reading it weeks ago, but there it is in my review. Its odd that I didn't even think of it in a knitting frame of mind until tonight, when trying to wrap my mind around both my stash and my inexplicable casting on problem (instead of my OhGodI'mNotReadyForThisFinal problem). See, I have this disorder that when I walk into a yarn store I completely forget what I was in there for. I wander about petting the wool with a vague notion that there's something I'm here for. But what? If I buy yarn for a project, it should stay in my head for that project. Shouldn't it?

In honor of embracing holistic knitting, I decided today that the tank I was going to make:



was instead destined to be

this:

(For the record, I didn't steal any bandwidth.)

In my world, regardless of what the husband says, I feel like I am finishing stuff. I've finished gifts for my mom's birthday (the face cloths), finally completed the knitting of blu (though I have to rip out the seaming *yet again*), and am nearly done with my Olympic sweater and soon, my albatross of an afghan. Holy crap, I say.

And the three skeins of Cascade 220 for the project I had in mind for it?

Why not make a shawl?