Frickly,
I know this is the problem isn't it.
Three years ago (long after the blanket knitting story

I started knitting a sweater for my grandbaby. I had a deadline I wanted to meet and was spending up to 5 hrs a day on it (couldn't do much else, so ... I had lots of time to devote to it). I way overdid it, and ended up with sore, bruised feeling hands, but also (because of a tendency to tendinitis in both arms) managed to mess up my right elbow and all the muscles in my lower arm.
I ended up with a right hand the size of a baseball mitt and a terribly painful arm, elbow was a mess. Couldn't use my right arm for anything for months. Had to sign my name for something once, and just managed to do it. Bought a bottle of pop (you guys say soda?) at a variety store and wanted to drink it on the walk home, and had to ask the clerk to open it for me. That was 5 months after the injury.
My right lower arm still gets sore, esp. if I am scared or when I was having panic attacks 2 yrs ago, felt like an animals teeth, like long needles, are biting
into my arm, and it ... pulsates. Rescue Remedy drops would take the pain away.
Huh. This is all you need, right? for me to scare you off of knitting.

This isn't going to happen to you Frickly. I have bad arms and hands to begin with and I seem to forever be overdoing it. All this typing the past few months, Yikes! I have to move the laptop to different locations to change my position at the keyboard.
Okay, back to the actual knitting again.

I read somewhere recently (I will see if I can dig it up later) this doctor recommends it to his cfs patients. It is a non-goal oriented thing so it doesn't stress the sympathetic nervous system. The way he prescribes it, he gives this example. One of his patients would take the subway into the city and they were to knit on the way to the city. And they were to unravel it on the way home. So it was truly just the act of knitting that soothed the nervous system or whatever, let the body just do something purely physically without the brain getting all hopped up about a project.
I have had to put down knitting for a time, and then pick it up again for a time... it is a patient pastime and it will wait for you as long as necessary.
