I was sitting in the living room on Monday night and my fingers were freezing.  I thought "I need a pair of fingerless gloves."  So I checked out various patterns online and on Tuesday started this pattern:

This is the "Fetching" pattern from Knitty.com.  I knitted them in Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran that I had left over from the scarf I knitted George back in December 2005.  The color number is 300506 and I would describe it as Fir Green.  With this pattern, I cabled without a needle for the first time and picked up my first thumbs.  I had to re-do the thumb on the first glove because I had big holes.  Now they're done and I'll leave them next to my chair in the living room for the next time my fingers are freezing while I knit, needlepoint or read.

Thoughts

I've been reading the Knitting Curmudgeon's archives lately.  She writes a lot about people being afraid to try new things in knitting.  I realized that I can often be one of those people.  It takes me a lot of time to work up my nerve to try something new -  a technique, a pattern, a substitute yarn, etc.  I tend to doubt my abilities.  Some of my fear is left over from when I couldn't afford much yarn so I was afraid of messing up and destroying the yarn I did have. 

But some of it is a fear of losing/wasting time.  I don't know where this fear comes from, but it has a big hold on my mind.  I fear losing time to having to reknit an item, to surfing the web and getting nothing substantial done, to just wasting time.  And I waste a lot of time, often doing nothing.  And then I beat up on myself for wasting all that time.  I often fear that my life will just disappear into "wasting" time.  I need to work through that and actually get somethings done.