I am an experienced crocheter—I have been doing it for decades. I should know how long it takes to make a stitch, a row, a sweater. Yet each and every time I set a firm deadline for a project I find I have underestimated the time I need to finish something by a rather large margin. If I say, “Yes, I can absolutely have that in the mail to you by Tuesday,” and it happens to be Thursday, I can pretty much guarantee you that the only way that would be possible without breaking any of the laws of physics would be if I neither slept, nor ate, nor took potty breaks. Those first two I might manage, but the last is problematic …
I have been known to choose delivery services based on what time their lobby window closes rather than which one is cheaper or more reliable. For the record? The local UPS deadline is 1:00 P.M., the USPS is 5:00 P.M., and for those really desperate dashes, there is a FedEx a twenty-minute drive away that accepts packages until 8:30 P.M. You get a FedEx package from me, you can pretty much bet that I was weaving in ends until 8:29.
Recently, I had an afghan to finish, and the crochet time warp was already on my mind, so I did a little math. I looked at all the pieces I had done and wrote down which pieces were not finished. I was on public transportation and was starting a new section so at the end of my forty-minute ride, I counted how many rows I had finished. Twenty rows in forty minutes (okay, they were pretty narrow rows) equals two minutes per row, give or take. When I got to the subway, the next leg of my journey, I used the calculator on my cell phone to figure out how many rows were left to do (X rows times two minutes, plus X hours to assemble the pieces and X more hours to crochet on an edging). When I started, I was guessing it would take about ten hours to finish the afghan but the calculator told me it was a bare minimum of twenty-eight and a half hours if all went well. As it happens, it took me about thirty hours. Ten hours? Ha! I wasn’t even close. Of course, how much crochet time did I have to comfortably make it to UPS? Twelve hours. Darn, FedEx again! And no sleep, and no meal breaks and—well you get the idea.
The other facet of the crochet time warp is that when I have my crochet mojo going, time passes and I am completely unaware of it. Same project, different day … I had the house to myself and a deadline to make, so I sat down in front of a crime show marathon on cable TV and started to crochet. The marathon started at noon. I was going to town on the afghan border and my stomach started to growl a little, so I thought I might take a break and go get some lunch. It was a little darker than I expected—was there a rainstorm blowing in? No, it was dusky and I was starving because it was six o’clock, not two, as I had thought. Where had the time gone? Lost in the crochet time warp.
As you can see, sometimes the crochet time warp is a bad thing (missed deadlines due to underestimation of time needed) and sometimes it is a good thing (blasting through a project without it feeling like work). What I think we need to do here is harness the power of the crochet time warp so that we can use its powers for good and not evil.
If only I could crochet through a root canal, those are some hours that I wish would flash by at the speed of light.