Start-itis - by Beckett

Neck scarf I started quite a while ago- it's waiting still...

Okay, it's true. I like knitting stuff. I admit that I am a process knitter; the actual process of knitting something is the interesting part for me, and the final product has to be well made, but I don't have a whole lot of need to keep it. So I make a lot of knitted stuff and give them away as gifts and such. Usually people don't complain too much about that.

Fingerless Mitts I've kept, and used a lot.

I have the craving lately, though. The craving to start a new project. I narrowly escaped getting myself new yarn for a project the other day. God knows I don't need more yarn, and I can't afford it anyway. I probably have more than enough yarn to keep me busy the rest of my life even if I knitted 24 hours a day for the rest of my time. Crazy, really. If anything, I need to toss my stash to get re-inspired by the wonderful yarns that I already have, not buy new yarn I don't have time to knit.

I have all that enthusiasm, though, that itch for a wonderful new project. It seems like all of that burning desire to create should be channeled into something great, doesn't it? That need to make something really cool tends to take over my brain and makes it hard to concentrate on other necessary things, I get distracted into thinking and planning designs and thinking up how to work out the technical details and so forth. I guess I need to carry a notebook around and actually write more of them down, and then actually make them.

Socks for Paul. Big socks for big feet take longer...

Actually making them is of course the sticking point. I don't have enough time to make that much, and I'm really good at starting projects and working out the designs and figuring out a lot of the technical challenges and then once I get it fairly far along, I lose interest in it and get all fired up to make something new, and the former favorite project languishes unfinished, so close yet so far from being finally done. It's maddening, really. I must have over 20 knitting projects alone that are waiting patiently to be finally done. And that's just the knitting projects. That doesn't even go into the art area, the drawing and painting projects, the sewing projects, the jewelry things, the book ideas...

I have silly, forlorn fantasies of finally making the time to clean out the garage and get it useable, but to be honest I have just about zero concrete desire to actually do the work involved, I wish it would just magically clean itself. I have similar fantasies about my unfinished projects that have lost my interest in finishing them, lost some of their charm in that last gasp of slogging through the actual construction process. I need some sort of magic solution to help these poor orphans keep my attention long enough for me to finally finish them. I've tried restricting myself to no new projects until I finish others, but then I end up hating the ones in the queue to be done with a resentful fury that really spoils the whole thing. They're not stupid, bad projects, they're still cool and wonderful, I just seem to have the attention span of a gnat on speed.

It's ridiculous, really. I need a magic finish-itis to balance all of my start-itis. So what do you do to get yourself to finish up a project that's lagging along? Or am I the only guilty one?