Wildcard: 27 April. Craft Your Perfect Day
Plan your fantasy day with your craft, It might just take up one hour of your day or be the entire focus of the day, but tell your readers where you’d love to craft, whether you’d craft alone or with friends, knitting or crocheting something simple or spending a day learning new skills.
My standards are remarkably low when it comes to the perfect crafting day (more positively: it doesn’t take much to make me happy). Basically, just give me time, a knitting or crochet project that I’m enjoying working on, and somewhere reasonable to sit, and I’m good to go.
I’m willing to be flexible on location, because based on past experience, I know that I’ve had great crafting experiences in all sorts of places. My knitting group meets in a coffee shop. A group of friends that I craft with alternates between our homes. I go on an annual knitting retreat in the far north. Each of these has pluses and minuses, as you’d expect. The coffee shop has the best variety of things to eat and drink. A friend’s home is comfortable, quiet, and more intimate—you don’t have to work around strangers who are sitting with your knitting group because they like the furniture in that part of the coffee shop. The knitting retreat offers Nature, something that city-bound me really appreciates (if only it was held at a time of year when it would be warm enough to sit outside and knit!).
Although I knit and crochet alone a lot and have a fine time doing so, I’d spend the hypothetical Perfect Crafting Day with friends, for all the reasons you ever spend time with your friends (you know, because they’re your friends). When crafting with others, you can choose to be part of the conversation or just listen to everyone else talk while you play with your yarn. You get to see what they’re working on (photos are great, but this is knitting/crochet: you’re going to want to touch the yarn) and rant about your project problems to an understanding audience.
In putting together the Perfect Crafting Day, one must not overlook the amenities. For all that knitting and crochet are pretty low-tech activities, I’ve concluded that WiFi is a definite plus to the crafting experience, especially if you’re with others. The conversation almost always brings up a point that you want to know more about—with a laptop or tablet at hand, you can quickly look it up while you’re all still there to talk about it. If someone mentions this great pattern they want to make, you can see it on Ravelry right then and there. Good food and drink readily available is a must for the perfect day as well. I like both the convenience of buying something ready-made at the coffee shop and getting to indulge my baking skills when crafting with friends at home or at the retreat. And of course there’s the furniture. It can be soft, it can be firm (within reason), but all I really ask is that I don’t have to deal with chair arms.
For the Perfect Crafting Day, I want to be working along on a project that interests me. While I like learning new skills, it’s not the same kind of pleasure as working on a project that I’m really enjoying the knitting or crocheting of. It’s one thing to have to concentrate on what you’re doing because it’s unfamiliar and you’re trying to get the hang of it, quite another to be able to relax and just appreciate the rhythm of your needles or hook.
Drat. I can’t write a post like this without wanting to drop everything and go work on my current projects!
Silver Threads 