I had always thought I was not unlike most knitters--five or six knitting projects on the go, spread among two or three knitting bags or baskets in the house, and several more projects planned for future days (and the yarns for them stashed away just waiting their turn!).
Even for my first attempt at knitting, I bought yarn for not one but two projects: both cable-knit sweaters. (It was before the days of the Internet, and I really had no idea what sort of project I should or shouldn't start knitting with, so I went with what looked interesting to me.) Before I finished the first sweater, I began the second, and I worked on one or the other, depending on my mood. I finished both in time for Christmas gift-giving. (They were both too big--I knew nothing about gauge swatches.) But the point is that from the get-go, I had more than one project on the go, and I don't remember a time in the intervening 25 or 26 years that I've had only one knitting project in progress.
What I'm learning, though, is that a lot of knitters are sequential knitters. They have one project on their needles at a time; they work away at it until it's done; and then they seek out the next and begin work on it. How organized! How productive! How focused! . . . How the heck do they do that?
I tend to have one or two "big" projects (sweater, poncho, blanket) on the go at a time and several smaller ones (hat, scarf, socks). So when people ask how long it takes me to knit a pair of socks, I can't really say. If socks were the only project I was working on, probably not long, but in reality, they're on my needles for two or three weeks.
Working on several projects, though, means I always have something I feel like knitting. If I were tackling one thing at a time, I imagine I might go a few days between picking up the needles. This way, if I don't feel like tracking rows on the shawl I'm working on, I can pick up another project and enjoy some mindless knitting. Or vice versa. No idle hands!
But I do see some advantages to having only one project on the go. It would motivate a person to finish in a hurry in order to get to the next one. And it certainly could help with knit supplies budgeting. For one thing, being this type of knitter would mean needing only one set of needles in each size, not the several that I have!
So are you a sequential knitter or a multiple-project knitter? And what advantages do you see to being the kind of knitter you are?
Sequential here, normally. I presently have 2 projects on the go and fear I might forget exactly where I’m at when returning to the previous project I started earlier. I think that is my preference; one at a time.