Introducing Freetime Knits

There comes a time when a knitter has to say, okay, enough, my cupboards are overflowing with yarn and I just can't hoard any more. Well, not without hoiking up the floorboards and using the recess as additional storage-cum-home insulation. 

Despite an imminent home reorganisation as I prepare for a new career as a home-based writer and designer, I'm facing the prospect of confronting my yarn stash head on and asking it what we both expect to get from each other from this point on. 

Freetime Knits are those I'll be knitting on the sly
when I probably should be working

Are we getting anywhere and making sweet handicrafts together or do we need to take a long hard look at the amount of time we spend in each other's company and decide whether we aren't really wasting each other's time a little, however fun this dalliance may be? 

Fleetingly, the thought occurs to me that I may have given up my day job in order to indulge my knitting and other obsessions. Really, though, that's just the guilt that has been drummed into me. I'm looking back at nearly 20 years of education swiftly followed by almost as many chasing a career and the elusive prospect of being settled with a home of my own. It's taken this long to be sufficiently in my own place mentally and legally. Some 'me time' is due. 

With no 'natural' career break to have kids, travel the world, write that long-promised novel or return to study, a pause is in order. I may even soft-pedal a while if my conscience allows. (Mainly, I'll probably be blind-panicking about the lack of freelance work I've managed to attract.)

What I probably won't do is stop knitting. I'll just rethink what my knitting's for and marshall my multicoloured flock into some semblance of order once my home becomes an office. My downtime - those 'resting' pauses in which actors indulge and writers perhaps blog or tweet - may well be spent idling clicking needles together. I create because I can - and because I am. 

My knits won't be commercial (I'm neither skilled nor speedy enough) and I'll try not to pressure myself heaps about knitting up a storm in order to bestow the softest and sweetest of gifts on family and friends. But if in my freetime I build up a modest pile of neatly worked stocking stitch sweaters and toys that grew in my downtime hours and could potentially be sold for a song, well, that's just me, okay. Freetime Knits from a free-spirited, newly enervated me.