getting in the mood to write

I'm going to compose a blog post to see if it helps with the thesis writing ;D. It's not like I have writer's block, I just ... have a very large mental wall to climb over. Sometimes that happens in knitting, too. That's when I usually lose my knitting mojo and do other stuff for a while. Losing your knitting mojo isn't all that dramatic, unless you are a knitting designer and actually have to make a living off of your skills. But I've lost my thesis mojo time and time again and every time that mental wall got higher and higher.

So when I lose my knitting mojo or just can't find the right pattern for the right yarn or can't think of anything I'd like to knit (because my queue does not have over 300 patterns on it, nooooo), sometimes I just turn to socks. Back during my first sock phase, I racked up a large queue of socks I had to knit and bought lots of sock yarn. I'm still always tempted by sock yarn and have large quantities of it. But the sock knitting craze stopped after six or seven pairs. It's really boring to have to knit the same thing twice, after all and as with my mittens, the second sock is usually much more even and tighter than the first one. So, when I lost my knitting mojo a while ago, I knit two pairs of socks - but took pictures of only one of them so far (with gratuitous shiny bug).

These are the Parrot Primavera socks - a mere exercise to use up yarn and get the pattern off my queue. The yarn I picked up at a supermarket in Styria along with a lot of other sock yarn, some of it very, very nice. I did regift them to my friend M., whose birthday was just around the corner, knitting is kind of convenient that way. The first pair I made will join my precious sock collection.

When trying to trick the knitting mojo back into flowing, simple sock patterns are best. A lot of repetition, nothing special, nothing too fancy, just a little pattern, because just plain stockinette is extremely boring (ask my lonely stockinette alpaca sock). Like these Charade socks, also made from Styrian supermarket yarn and also gifted to a friend:

Or, if you don't have a pattern and just feel like using up sock yarn, there are plenty of easy structural stitch patterns, like the one I used on my Ginger socks (made out of Lana Grossa Meilenweit):

So, socks that are made while the mojo flows look different. Like these Kew socks, also done in Lana Grossa Meilenweit:

The irony of it all is that I don't wear woolen socks very often. That's also kind of why I stopped knitting socks. I only wear them over cotton socks when my feet are cold and only around the house, so that's another reason why I prefer knitting mittens and gloves. Sometimes I wonder whether I should do a queue purge ... but then, what would I do if my mojo failed me again?

Now I'm going to try and wrap my brain around something thesis-related. I'm trying to imagine my mental wall like below and just picture the blue sky.

Edited to add: Well, whaddayaknow, 3 new pages, bringing the total up to 12! That's 8,3% of the total or over 1/10th.
Edited to add: As has been pointed out to me, 8,3% is less than 1/10. My mathematical brain has shrunk from pea-size to ... grain of sand-size? 12 pages are 12% of the total *blush*.