If you know me, you know I love to knit. I don’t just see it as an enjoyable pastime to pull out on a snow day or those last few weeks before Christmas. I knit all year long. We only get one or two weeks of scorching hot humid weather a year where I live and even during those hot and sticky weeks when all of my fellow Canadians are revelling in having a different kind of weather to complain about, you will find me knitting something small like a sock or a mitten while I am at the beach. You see, that way I will be all set when the cold weather returns a few weeks later. I keep it small in summer because as much as I like knitting, no one wants a lap full of wool in July. Besides, if it is too hot and humid, wool tends to felt as you knit it. I see that as the wool’s way of telling me it likes to hibernate in the height of summer.
Everywhere I go, I knit. That is what purses are for, I have decided, to carry knitting projects and a little pouch of knitting tools, and since I already have the bag ready to take along, I might as well toss my wallet and keys in there too. I knit while waiting for my kids in the orthodontist’s office, when visiting friends, waiting for a haircut, I have even been known to get a few rounds of a sock done while waiting in a particularly long line at the grocery store. A few years ago our family made a trip across Canada. We drove 10,000 km and I knit this along the way. It took about 100 hours of knitting and I loved every stitch of it.
The entrelac knitting you see at the top of this blog page is something I knit when I was still a fairly new knitter. I didn’t care that it was supposed to be challenging, I just wanted to make something beautiful and so I tackled it.
So what happened? I have been happily and successfully knitting for most of my life and I seem to have lost my touch. Sweaters, shawl, mittens, socks, toys, hats and scarves have all come off my needles happily over the past few decades. Now I suddenly find myself unable to produce anything! In the past month I have started mittens, a cowl, a hat, socks and a simple sweater, and every one had to be ripped out and put aside for another project. Just this weekend I cast on for the same sweater four different times and even though I did a gauge swatch and carefully counted and measured each time, I got a vastly different sweater-in-the-making – none of which I could have worn. The first two would have fit around three of me. The third attempt seemed promising until I realized I had made a huge error and either had to rip it back or else reattach one of my arms to be right beside the other one. I decided to go with the yarn rip rather than the arm rip. I thought through all of my mistakes and even though I was tired of re-knitting the same thing yet again, gave it one more go and was hopeful to get a lot of it done today – and wouldn’t you know? This version would probably fit my 14 pound Lhasa Poo perfectly. I gave up and returned the yarn to the stash. It doesn’t want to be this sweater, apparently. And frankly, I don’t want to look at it again for awhile either. I just looked up and saw that I knit the sleeves for the sweater first – and wouldn’t you know, they are too long by about eight inches. Great.
My project today, in between working and caring for three sick kids home from school while my husband is away, is to figure out what I can knit. As much as I love the actual knitting part, I love it when all of that yarn action actually turns into something beautiful and warm for someone to wear. I don’t love it enough to just keep ripping it all back. Besides, if I lose my knitting mojo, what am I going to do with all of this?
cookiesandmittensandmore 