My Best Ideas Come To Me In The Shower!

As I've often told my knitting students, some of my "crazy-wonderful" ideas seem to be downloaded to me (from the Universe?) while I'm in the shower. I now know that I ALWAYS need to have a pen and paper next to my sink at ALL times to jot down those wild ideas.

When I was in high school I ran across a poem that exemplifies the fear of every artist who's met with a fleeting germ of an idea that crosses the mind in a flash, only to evaporate before it is ever grasped and committed to paper. It is from a book of poetry called "Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle...and other modern verse" by Stephen Dunning/Edward Lueders/Hugh Smith.

The poem is called Gone Forever by Barriss Mills. It goes like this:

Halfway through shaving, it came--

the word for a poem.

I should have scribbled it

on the mirror with a soapy finger,

or shouted it to my wife in the kitchen,

or muttered it to myself till it ran

into my head like a tune.

But now it's gone with the whiskers

down the drain. Gone forever,

like the girls I never kissed,

and the places I never visited--

the lost lives I never lived."

SO that's why I take great care of the potential design ideas that I get in the shower. They are jotted down quickly, then when I'm dried and dressed, they are illustrated in more detail.

Then, if I simply can't bear to wait, I swatch a little swatch to see if the idea really works in "real life". And if it still has grabbed hold of me, I knit it until it's finished. Somehow, during this process all the other "drop-deadlines" sit on hold and don't seem to be any the worse for wear!

Don't tell my husband I get my ideas in the shower! He thinks they come when I'm sitting on the beach while staying at an expensive beach rental gazing at the Pacific Ocean. I don't know where he got THAT idea!!

Besides, it's really the dog who loves the beach the most!

Good Boy!!