Keeping notes

One of the recurring items on my list of resolutions or goals is to start journaling or at least keeping notes more. But I never really do. I started often, but the perfectionist in me was always dissatisfied with how things looked and then I stopped writing and destroyed it all. I’ve done that as long as I can remember, even as a child. And that makes me sad. Not that I would have kept boxes and boxes of notebooks and diaries over the past 50 years (or would I?) but getting rid of (some of) them because it’s time to let go, is a whole different story than doing it out of self criticism.

A few days ago, I was cleaning out my knitting basket. I still had the leftovers of the grandson sweater in it, and wanted to make space for new projects. As I was laying out the contents of the basket, I realized I had to write a note about that sweater in my knitting notebook (the red notebook in the picture above). I found I hadn’t written anything in it in 2024, but that was a quick issue to resolve. Apart from two simple headbands (just some ribbing in the round), it was only that little sweater…

Oh well. That’s not what I wanted to talk about today. What I realized when I leaved through the notebook, was that I started writing in it in 2015 and scribbled notes about my knitting projects in it ever since. That’s almost ten years!
I have to admit, I don’t like the way it looks on the inside. It’s anything but consistent (ink colors, layout) and most of the pages look very messy. It’s nothin like the beautiful layouts I see on the internet. But I haven’t stopped using it and I didn’t destroy it. That’s a first for me.

I don’t really know why this little book was different than all the ones before, but I think it has something to do with already accepting that it would be messy when I started writing in it. It’s such a beautiful book that everything I would do with it would be wrong in my perfectionist mind. But the girls gave it to me for Christmas and I wanted to show appreciation by actually using it. So I popped it into my knitting basket, carefully wrote down the pattern for the Honey Cowl, messed up writing the last rows and stopped caring about perfection after that, because it would have been such a waste to destroy that book.

At first I thought: well, I guess buying expensive notebooks will be the cure to my problem. And I may use that as an excuse someday 😉

But I think the real reason is just accepting that it will be messy and ugly. So I dug up a notebook from my notebook drawer (yes, I have one and yes, they’re al empty) and popped it in my knitting basket too, to use as a reading notebook. (I usually have a book and/or my ereader in my knitting basket too, so that makes sense to me. )

It’s not going to be a reading journal, a commonplace book or something artsy. I’m just going to list the books I read, maybe write down some notes about it, or some quotes from it, but only if I feel like it. Much like the knitting notes. It’s going to be messy. It already is. I messed up the very first page. But the notebook is messy too (yellowed from the humid, salty air here), so that’s good.

Now my mind is racing with other notebooks and journals I’d like to have (herbal notes, garden notes, a nature journal, a grimoire…), but I think I’m sticking with these two for now. Start slowly…