I swear I can’t hold a train of thought for 5 seconds anymore. Is it my addled brain, the constant stream of information and interruption. Why can’t I ignore the flashing light on my phone? Why does every news report or article you read on line have to link to other related and sometimes unrelated articles? You don’t know if they are related until you click and then you have fallen down an endless rabbit hole hours have gone by and you haven’t even tracked down that first little piece of information you were looking for. Or is that just me?

As a blogger I love all the linking and trails of breadcrumbs that you can leave in the hopes that people will find you and subsequently adore you. But as a consumer, and what I like to think of as a relatively intelligent person, I hate it. The videos that start playing without any provocation on my part while I am in the middle of reading an article, disrupt my already waning levels of concentration. The links with the sensationalized headlines that scream for and sometimes grab my attention, generally leading me to something other than what I expected. And the pop up windows which always annoy me, now have the added infuriating factor of being more difficult to close. There is so much information on every single screen (without even scrolling up down left or right) very little of it being what you are actually looking for.

Maybe if you are under the age of 20 you can make sense of the cacophony but for me at the end of a search for information I just feel exhausted and angry. I am not talking about searching for a recipe or what I will call single tier searches like crafting ideas or DIY’s those searches are fairly easy, reliable and pleasant although they do suffer from the same “Click here,” “no click over here,” “wait click me” clickiness problem.

But multiply the clickiness p roblem with a more complicated topic and I will loose many precious hours of my day.  The answer is just one click away, and then one more and one more and then “what was the question anyway?”

I guess what I am saying is I have a link problem. I have link-a-holism.

I am a link-a-holic.

I say this a little tongue-in-cheek but it is honestly a real problem and I do wonder if my brain has lost some of its capacity to focus on complex problems for lengthy amounts of time. Maybe it is just the aging process taking its toll. But in this sound bite society who can be sure.

And that my friends is one of the reasons I craft. I make things. Sometimes they are simple and sometimes are more complex but they are always a place where I can actually focus my attention for an extended period of time and that is a way of relaxing.

And so today after spending (wasting?) many hours trying to make some sense of our current political quagmire I concluded the only thing to do was to cut up some tee shirts. And so I cut with no particular plan for the t-shirt yarn but to roll it into balls for some future project that I’m sure will astound you. For now I like them displayed in this bowl.

The process is simple.

Flatten the shirt, trim off the bottom hem and then cut from one side to the other leaving an inch or two uncut on one side.

To make continuous yarn cut remaining shirt in a diagonal pattern.

Stretch yarn to curl into yarn shape and wind into a ball.

Somewhere in the middle of the t-shirt cutting I turned my back and this happened.

Cats and crafts. Always a soothing combination or in this case at least good for a laugh.

Happy Upcycling my friends.