In my high-pressure world (50% psychologist and 50% air-traffic-controller) it is kind of nice to have a ‘mindless’ activity to keep your hands occupied and your brain from melting down.
Way back I tried my hand at macrame and found it quite satisfying as far as ‘brain breaks’ go. Just the act of endlessly weaving the same knots lowers the blood pressure and in accompaniment of a good tune (might I recommend Cindy Bradley’s ‘Stockholm Summer’?) is sure to bring a quiet smile in no time at all!
Sadly way back the material of choice was something called Phentex, nasty stuff, the byproduct of some alchemist’s accident in the oil industry. The stuff came in cool colours, but it stretched, frayed and brought blisters to my hands – basically nasty stuff. Thankfully it has gone out of popularity, i hear it was quite flammable as well!
These days it seems, if social media is to be trusted, that paracord is the new Phentex so I have been giving it a whirl. There are some cool colours out there but i have been sticking to the pastels, but by and large it is quite good.
So of course that means that everyone who knows me is either going to ask for a bracelet, remark at my bracelet or generally get sick of hearing about my paracord knottyness.
Here are few I have done in the past wee bit while the IT industry burned (jk, I can knot and take care of the trickiest of linux server horrors – true multitasking!
By the way… did I tell you about my bracelet?