Knitting So Much It Hurts

 It's been a long two years since my husband and I packed up our home of thirty years and moved to a different part of town.  There were lots of reasons, but unfortunately the neighborhood was degrading into loud music, cars with horribly loud music sitting in apartment parking lots at all hours of the night.  Now we have a quiet neighborhood but after redesigning our old house over thirty years to the way we liked it, we have had to start again adding some features we missed from our old house.  So we have been spending time adding grass seed, gardens and most recently a deck off the back of the house. Luckily it was a down on the ground deck but it took a lot of lumber and oh boy are my hands hurting from hauling lumber.   That wouldn't be such a big deal but I am working hard on knitting sweaters for my granddaughters, three of them before Christmas.  I have only knit one or two sweaters in all my years of knitting mostly because 1) they take forever to knit and 2) you usually have to follow a pattern which I am not good at doing.  

But I decided after knitting thirty hats this last year, it was time for something different. That and my family is tired of receiving hats.  And...I also decided to change up the knitting pattern and add a heart on the front: Tada!!

Now for you really good knitters this may not seem like a big deal, but it is huge to me to have to track down some graph paper, which I have never used...not being a math person I never saw the need until I had to make a pattern for the heart I wanted to stitch.   Luckily my daughter-in-law who is very crafty had some. So I have now advanced to working on the second sleeve and I will be almost finished with it!! I am so excited and hoping that it fits at least one of the girls. Yes, I measured but for some reason it looks short to me.  We'll see when it gets sewn up.  Oh by the way I am using Yarn Bee Sugar Wheel yarn for these because I love the color variants as I knit along.

But, because of all my knitting and wood-working, my fingers have been screaming at me. More than just the little bit of arthritis, two of my right hand fingers won't move at all or worse, get a charley-horse in them.  Ouch. The poor things have been overworked.  Picking up and carrying several ten foot long deck boards did not help them at all. 

One of my daughters bought me a hand wax tub where you melt the wax then dip your hand it to make it hurt less and feel smooth. The only problem is sitting around twenty minutes while the wax hardens on your hand which means you cannot do anything but sit still.  Using the phone or reading a book is impossible so I don't use it real often.  I also tried a roll on analgesic with lidocaine which works but again you cannot use your hand while it tries and once it dries the analgesic relief doesn't last long.

Even typing this blog piece is killing my fingers.  Suffering for so many arts can really be a big pain.