I have been doing a dance around knitting for the past decade. My sense is I am ready to give it up and yet I just can’t seem to. So I plod along knitting and ripping often the very same yarns year after year. This time of year when the morning chill appears I am particularly drawn to the needle and yarn, and yet subsequent to the fondle of color and texture, boredom sets in. I am continually drawn to try something other than what I am working.
I learned to knit when I was 17 and in the hospital for 7 weeks. My mother brought some Icelandic lopi wool yarn and huge needles to the hospital and taught me not only to knit but to follow a pattern. I created a beautiful blue and white sweater with buttonholes no less, which I wore for about a decade until I absent-mindedly dropped it into the washer! I’ve knit only one other sweater by pattern since and that was a purple silk/wool pullover which took me forever but I loved when it was finished until a moth liked it even more.
Quickly I accumulated a shelf full of knitting pattern books drawn in entirely by the pretty pictures of colors and texture. I never used them for guidance as my visual brain thinks it knows better than any jive pattern. As I did with weaving I stumbled along with a lot of fits and starts with limited success. The reader might say just follow the dang manual but I simply cannot. Nothing tortures me more in life than following a recipe!
I joined a knitting group and learned how to teach knitting! I learned every pattern known to (wo)mankind only because I had to knit up a tiny swatch. I never taught anyone! How could I teach others to follow the recipe when I can’t follow directions myself?
This coat was inspired by a Kaffe Fassett pattern and knit without following the directions! It was huge and I had to cut it to fit when finished. This was a process garment. I picked up the needles the day after my Mother died of a stroke and when I laid them down I had a new coat!
I gave up weaving and spinning just before I took up quilting. I donated most of my yarn stash to charity, to schools for teaching or to friends. Over the years I have slowly relinquished more and more of the yarn. I held on to a small sampling of chosen threads. Mostly I chose them because I had either spun the yarn or was completely seduced by the color or it cost so much I felt I should really do something with it…which if you consider the depreciation factor of 25+ years on the shelf or in a basket really counts for squat.
So the time of year is here again and I want to knit, but do I really? The images here are of various pieces I started free-form with the idea of making a vest. Maybe if I knit them all together now I would have something?! Even while piling the yarns for the photo I was thinking oooh maybe a little of this and a lot of that would be a good mix. The blurry strips are from watching the last winter Olympics! I was going to make a cool kimono-shape sweater.
I do love to knit while waiting. I knit through meetings so I can keep my snarky comments to myself. I am intolerant of poorly run meetings and knitting is my medicine. It seems all I knit anymore is ski socks for my husband or scarves. I already have at least 50 exquisite dyed, painted, woven, gorgeous silk, cotton and wool scarves…do I really need more? Oh, I forgot….need has nothing to do with it!
Several years ago I recognized that if fertilizer came in fuchsia I would buy it. I really believe this see-saw with the knitting yarns is interconnected. So much of my struggle seems to be tied into the seduction of color and texture in my life.
Perhaps it is just my direction that has changed. Meanwhile I wonder how that hand-spun blah beige would look with a splash of fuchsia… Strangely I have been pondering whether I needed a felting machine or not. I could felt all this stuff together and then toss it!
