Minutes full of time to stitch

If you’ve ever said, “I don’t have time to knit,” – or sew or crochet or quilt – you’re not alone. But the fact is we do have time. We just need to figure out how to organize ourselves to make use of that time. Instead of just doing it, as the running shoe commercial advises, we fret because we don’t have hours to work on projects, and fail to see potential in minutes. Big blocks of time are wonderful when we have them, but they really aren’t necessary to build a blissful and enduring relationship with fabric and yarn.

Handwork is portable. It can go anywhere, including to your place of work to enjoy during a lunch break, to the waiting room at the doctor’s office or to a friend’s house on a Sunday afternoon. Or even in the car on a trip.

In the 1990s, when I was shuttling back and forth across the United States between here and Lincoln, Neb. – I was not doing the driving – I crocheted on three round trips, nearly 2,000 miles one way, and completed a granny afghan in all its maroon and lavender fuzzy beauty. That afghan now lives most happily on the back of a chair, where the cat perches each morning to contemplate how she plans to spend her day – eat, sleep, sleep, sleep.

On one of those trips to Nebraska, I discovered that I knit 60 stitches to the mile. Once, when I was working somewhat slower than that, I knitted one mitten going out west in the fall and its mate going back east in December.

Years ago, when I was raising five children and a sled dog team, I learned three things about finding or making time to do the things I love:

. Keep my needlework handy and always have two or three projects in progress.

. That projects are more portable and enjoyable if they are simple and don’t require intricate patterns or tools;

. To keep my knitting by a favorite chair, to stash a tote bag with crochet hook and yarn in the back seat of the car and to keep an embroidery project in a basket in the room where the TV is.

At one point in my life, when I perceived time as running away, running out and running over me, I took my knitting to bed each night and worked four rows before I went to sleep. Now, I knit four rows each morning before I head off to work. This winter, I knit a sweater using short snippets of time.

Getting organized to do needlework is as simple as tucking supplies and patterns in a tote bag or basket. Even a plastic bag from the supermarket works quite well as a tote bag, thank you – sometimes even better than a fancy one because it eliminates angst about spilled coffee or getting it smeared with dog and-or baby drool.

Having a special bag or basket for needlework, something you make yourself, a friend or relative makes for you, or perhaps one handed on to you by a relative, brings a special satisfaction, though. It proclaims your status as one who sees possibilities in skeins of yarn or blank pieces of linen. It marks you as a part of the great chain of stitchers going all the way back to the beginning of time when humans first figured out how to twist grass into mats.

Finding friends who stitch and arranging to meet them an hour or two each month is an easy way to reserve time for needlework. Stitch and Bitch, my – I hesitate to say group, because we are so loosely knit as to resemble dropped stitches – I’ll call them sisters, for that they truly are. We decided long ago that our only agenda is to show up at the appointed time and place. We have no officers, no bylaws, no state or national affiliations, no dues and no duties or responsibilities except to do what we do – knit, crochet, sew on buttons, embroider – and laugh a lot.

Time is always slip sliding away, but it’s always flowing toward us, too – in streams, snippets and blocks. If we want to claim some of it for needlework, it’s there – a precious thread waiting for us to take it up and do something with it.

Snippets

Mary Gray, an antiques dealer in Searsport, e-mailed to alert readers to “off-gassing” buttons. She says old buttons should not be kept in metal tins, contrary to our grandmothers’ best intentions, because some old plastics will produce gases that will deteriorate themselves and others around them, causing metal buttons to rust and the rust to spread.

The Fabric Garden on Route 201 in Madison is offering a woolfelt hand sewing class 2-4:30 p.m. Saturday, March 15. To obtain information, call 474-9628.

Studio 312, 23 Hammond St., Bangor, will have a 6-hour class in fabric collage using photo transfer techniques March 15. For details, call Sally Lesko Bates at 469-0607 or 944-4895.

Ardeana Hamlin can be reached at 990-8153, (800) 432-7964 or e-mail ahamlin@bangordailynews.net.