How needlework is saving my studies...

...or, put less dramatically, keeping me awake. You see, I have this...let's call it condition for the lack of a better word (I blame it on my abyssmal low blood pressure) that when I just have to sit and listen and don't actually DO something, I kind of dooze away. I can't do anything against it, as much as I try, and I can assure you, it's neither that I'm just tired (as it happens at all times of the day and after 8 hours sleep just as much as after 6) nor that what I'm listening to ist boring - I regularyly drift off in the cinema once popcorn and such have run out, and I even missed some talking in the musical we went to see last year (thankfully, the songs were loud enough to bring me back, woud be a shame to miss something one paid that much for!).

As you can probably guess, it's especially frustrating during lectures - most of our profs do those with power point presentations, and those are way to fast to take good notes, so I usually missed a good part of them. I tried several ways to keep my hands busy in order to stay concious, but most of them just involved to much thinking and I still missed most of the lecture. Until Felix had the great idea to just take my needlework with me - not stitching, that's not portable enough and involves to much counting to be done 'on the side', but crocheting seems just right.

So over the last two weeks I tried that out - printed a pattern, grabbed my hook and a ball of yarn, and stashed them in my backpack - and it works! Why didn't we think of this ealier, it would have saved me a lot of hassle and revising in previous terms. So over the course of three lectures (which is about 4-5 hours, plus a little finishing at home) I crocheted a 'Pop Heart'.

This still involved quite a lot of counting, which lead either massive frogging (I just learned that word - I like it) or missing parts of the lecture again, but still, it's so much better than before, because now I am in control when I'll just keep crocheting or when I'll put the needle down to just fully focus for a few minutes.

I already got my next project planned and actually started yesterday, though I'm not telling yet - still have to see how it works out. Two hints though - a) it involves next to no counting, which makes it ideal for working in the lectures, and b), it's actually useful for once - as much as I love Amigurumi, most of the time I don't know what to actually do with them, so now I'm trying to focus on making at least my crotcheting (and hopefully knitting, if I manage to learn that again - knitting and I, we have a history, but that's a story for an other post) on making stuff that has actually a purpose. I might talk about that some more later, but I don't want to rob myself of a chance for a small blog post some time I don't have actuall progress to show, now do I? For now, I'm off to university. And crocheting.