Cast On

Ghost in the Orchard. Four inches from done. I’d stare at the cable chart and the tiny squares would dance. Close my eyes. Open them. Over and over. The hands that made those cables could not remember how cables worked.Endel Tulving‘s encoding specificity principle. Godden and Baddeley’s divers learning words underwater. Jonathan Spence‘s memory palace. And 60% of the total surface of our brains committed to our hands.My second sweater - bricky red, carnelian buttons, the physical therapist who inadvertently retired it - became the Gaia Jacket from Jean Moss’s Sculptured Knits. Which became the red cabled vest I’m knitting now. Thirty years of memory in the same wool.Serotonin stripped the filters. Melatonin locked the repair. Dopamine lit the paths. Norepinephrine broke the bridge. Memory is where it all comes home.Music: Rore, Arrival; Waveshaper, Our Time (Instrumental)If you’d like to help support the podcast, you can do so via Ko-fi or Patreon, or by spreading the word to a fellow knitter. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brendadayne.substack.com/subscribe

Tears in the kitchen. Three bananas on the counter and a recipe I know by heart but cannot, for the life of me, turn into a sequence of actions. Seven ingredients. Too many decisions. My brain could not do seven. So I broke it down. Dry ingredients in one bowl. Wet in the other. Three and four. Manageable. The bread was good. I ate it in bed and felt unreasonably proud of myself.The locus coeruleus is the brain’s attention control room. When norepinephrine depletes, everything arrives at equal volume. A dog barking becomes as important as the eggs.An old friend helps out in the kitchen. And the moment when I realised the invisible labour I’d been doing for decades had only become visible because I could no longer do it.Music: Jude Cosmo, Queen of Angeles; Waveshaper, Our Time (Instrumental) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brendadayne.substack.com/subscribe

From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, Nighthawk n. a recurring thought that only strikes you late at night. Mine struck every night for eight weeks.Zopiclone is a sledgehammer. Daridorexant is a key. One imposes sleep. The other removes the obstacle to it. There’s a big difference, and finding it changed everything.Also: Jasper as Big Spoon. An AI health czar who suggested I should just pour ethanol directly on my brain to save time. And the thing I found at 3am that stayed.Music: Christopher Wohrle, Dust; Waveshaper, Our Time (Instrumental)If you’d like to help support the podcast, you can do so via Ko-fi or Patreon, or by spreading the word to a fellow knitter. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brendadayne.substack.com/subscribe

Trimethoprim for a UTI. Seven days. By day three, everything was hysterically funny. By day five, I could hear things that weren’t there. By week two, I couldn’t track yarn overs in garter stitch. Garter stitch.The projects on my needles when my brain broke Bradford Road, Dark Days, Ghost in the Orchard were beyond me for the next four months. The only thing that still worked was drop spindling. Hands remembered what the brain forgot. So I made yarn. The weird pantry. Lexical-gustatory synaesthesia from folate antagonism - undocumented, as far as I can tell. There might be a paper in it. Hit me up if you want to write it. I documented everything. This is the first episode of Your Brain on Knitting - five short episodes, designed to be listened to back to back. One broken brain. Four neurotransmitters. And the knitting woven through it all. Music: Hannah Parrott, The Feeling; Waveshaper, Our Time (Instrumental)If you’d like to help support the podcast, you can do so via Ko-fi or Patreon, or by spreading the word to a fellow knitter. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brendadayne.substack.com/subscribe

Zabava Shorties disasters. The signs were there. Sometimes, you need to break up with a sock pattern. “It’s not you, it’s me. I don’t like you anymore.” Meanwhile, the Peppermint Pocket Skirt delivers enormous pockets perfect for sock projects, and Ruth Collins’ Top Down Centre Out method might revolutionize trouser fitting.The Bradford Road wrap progresses through garter rectangles. Big Love Cardigan waits for cooler weather. But sewing succeeded where knitting failed—the Peppermint Pocket Skirt (free collaboration between Peppermint Magazine and Paper Theory) paired beautifully with the Block Tee, with right angle sewing tutorial making construction straightforward.The revelation: Ruth Collins’ Top Down Centre Out trouser fitting method. Begin with fitted waistband, construct single-leg toile, achieve proper fit without body-shaming adjustments. Demonstrated through Stacey Taylor’s free YouTube series at The Crooked Hem.Beyond practical successes and failures: Robert Pirsig’s concept of Quality from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Through memories of 4-H sewing club and Claire Schaeffer’s couture techniques, we consider how sustained attention gets woven into handmade items’ structure. What happens when we show up fully present—whether adjusting carburetors or setting sleeves.Music: Jim Fidler, Merrigan’s Reel; The Wilder Road, The Light the Heat; The National Parks, Who Knows This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brendadayne.substack.com/subscribe