Today seems to have disappeared without me actually achieving anything much. I woke at about 5.30am but knew that it was far too early to get up so managed to convince myself that I could get back to sleep again. I will admit that I took some medication to help me sleep last night so I knew that dropping off again was a real possibility.
I woke again about 10.30am, made myself some breakfast, got some bits and pieces out of the freezer to tide me over the weekend, and sat down to check my emails and read a few blogs.
Sleep was still something that I thought I needed but I knew that I needed to get the most important chores done first. Once they were out of the way, the rest of the day would be my own. My Saturdays are for relaxing, if at all possible, and I didn't really have the energy or the enthusiasm for anything too taxing.
The first exciting (or not) job that I gave myself today was to sort out the problem that I had with one of the scarves that I am knitting. I made a mistake a couple of days ago and it required me to unpick a few rows to put everything right again. So having unpicked about 10 rows stitch by stitch I eventually go back to where I had made the error and then
reknitted some of those rows so that whenever I decide to do some more work on that particular scarf I know that everything will be okay with it.
The next job was to sort out the squares for the Flower Garden Shawl. I wrote last week about having made all 64 of the squares necessary for this shawl, but having completed them I realised that I probably had enough wool to add another complete row to the shawl so yesterday I decided to crochet another 21 squares, and because I now know the pattern by heart and can crochet each one in less that 15 minutes, it didn't take me long to create the extra squares and add them to the pile. This meant that this afternoon I could sit down with all 85 squares and do a little sorting out. Most of the squares are a combination of two or three different colours, but because of the way that the wool is dyed there was a tendency for a number of the squares to turn out to be completely gingery brown and it was important that these get spread around the shawl as much as possible so the first job was to pull out and place in a separate pile all of the ginger squares. Once that was done it was simply a case of selecting 13 squares and then joining them together in a V-shape so as to form the first row of the shawl. While selecting the squares took seconds, joining them was much slower but an hour or so later the job was finished.
Having completed the first row, I decided to select the 15 squares needed for the second row and then to lay them out alongside the completed first row to see how they could be put together. While doing all this, I was also half watching a DVD (Out of Africa). The problem was that I don't remember much of the film because after what was probably only about 15 minutes of it I dropped off to sleep and didn't wake up until about three hours had passed.
Since waking again I have done some more work on the shawl. More than half of the second row's squares have been joined to the first row, although they still need to be joined to each other. I have also had something to eat, and watched a programme on BBC
iPlayer. I have read a few blogs, and I decided to sit down to write a little about my day.
I haven't achieved much today, but what I have achieved has all been good and worthwhile. Depression so often robs me of the ability to do even the simplest things that to achieve anything at all can seem like winning an Olympic medal. I've found myself crying at odd moments for no apparent reason, I have collapsed into sleep because my body needed it and for a moment my brain was still enough to allow it to happen, I have managed to force myself to eat some food at regular intervals through the day and made sure that I had plenty to drink, none of it alcoholic.
It might not be much, but I am quite happy with what I have managed to do today. It is living one day at a time that has enabled me to get through the last 11 years and it is what will hopefully keep me going for a long time yet.
There are lots of ends still to be woven in or to be trimmed and still 11 squares to be joined onto the shawl. If things go well tonight I may be able to get all those things done, then I will only have to do the border crocheting to finish the shawl completely. The joining together and the weaving in of ends is a job that I really hate. If I could just do the knitting or crocheting I would be very happy, but at the end of each project there is the finishing off to be done and that can be a real pain, sometimes taking as long or longer than the creating part of the project. But, like they say about exercise, there's no gain without pain, and so it is with my handicrafts, unless I do the parts of the project that I hate they will never be finished.
