Knitting
Understand that it’s okay to be productive in a small way … Allow yourself the gift of absorption.
– Michelle Obama, The Light We Carry
For just under the past year, I’ve been absorbed by something which seems completely impractical: piecing together a sock or sweater stitch by laborious stitch, in an age when it would take a fraction of the time and cost to buy one premade. I’ve spent hours doing what basically amounts to looping a long piece of string over itself using two sticks. I don’t do anything else in my life that is quite as illogical or inefficient, or even that is so little about the final product. I go into every project envisioning that it is the “one”—the ideal pair of cushy socks I’ll never take off, the sweater that will feel like a warm hug every time I slip it on, that will drape just so—but while there is nothing quite as satisfying as “binding off” a project, I probably spend less time with all that yarn after I’ve finished it than while I’m making it.
“Here’s the whole idea of knitting. One stick holds loops of yarn and a second stick pulls a continuous piece of string through the loops, one by one. Row upon row is accomplished until you have a piece of knitted fabric.”
Don’t get me wrong. I love my finished projects so much I have a hard time giving them away (at this point I don’t even try to pretend I’m knitting something for someone else). But it’s clear by now that the value lies in the making: being inspired by different patterns, selecting the fiber and weight of yarn, experimenting to find the right needle size, that magical cast-on moment, then the surprisingly satisfying knit. Which I can’t quite explain, except to say that there is something meditative and soothing about the motion itself, maybe like how one feels petting a cat, or running, if you’re the type of person who likes running. The rhythm is nearly metronomic. You don’t have to think so much (I can do the stockinette stitch with my eyes closed), and yet your focus is grounded in something tangible, the feel of the yarn slipping through your fingers.
There is too the satisfaction of sheer creation. A friend once said that she wanted to do more creating and less consuming. There’s something life-giving about making something that didn’t exist before, not for any other reason than that you wanted to try making it. Not for a deadline, not for a salary, not for the sake of duty or obligation—not even anything big or consequential. Just something small, for fun, because you wanted to. Maybe something about this connects us with God. Why did God create trees in the forests that no one will ever see? Why did he make not one wildflower, but dozens in the meadow? There’s something about seeing something take shape for its own sake which restores a sense of delight and simplicity which we so often lose in our consumeristic, busy lives.
Knitting is a chance to learn something new. With almost every project, I try something I’ve never seen before except on a YouTube video: cabling, turning a heel, short rows, casting on in the middle of a project, double-stranded colorwork, techniques attached to flashy adjectives and names (JSSBO, or Jeny’s Surprisingly Stretchy Bind-off!). There’s a sense of thrill and wonder in that. There’s a trust in how things will turn out when I’m doing a pattern for the first time: often I won’t be able to understand it by reading it through (transfer to what? pick up where?)—I just have to start. Once the stitches are live on the needle, once I’m holding the piece in my hands, the next step, often only the very next step, starts to become clear. New techniques and patterns are all a little like faith: exercising my belief in the physics of the thing, in the experience of the pattern-writers, by moving along even though I can’t quite see how it’s all going to turn out.
Lastly—and it must be said—knitting involves a lot of mistakes, and dealing with mistakes. It’s like how Peggy Orenstein puts it in her book Unraveling: I’m too lazy to fix my mistakes, and too neurotic not have them keep bothering me. Fixing is no small task; it can mean hours of fiddling through confusing loops of yarn with a crochet needle, or just tearing it all out to the point of the mistake and redoing it, a process which knitters call “frogging” (rip it! rip it!). I’ve done it all: live with the mistake of half my blanket looking different than the other half because I got the stitch pattern wrong, ripping out my entire project because my gauge was off and it turned out too big or too small, making two socks in mis-matched sizes and convincing one of my kids to wear them. Do I wonder if it’s even worth it all? Yes. Am I amazed at my own ability to mess up even the simplest instructions? Yes. Do I just keep on and accept that mess-ups are part of life? Yes.
My kids have started to knit, or at least try to, and I can’t help but think of my mom teaching me, and a sweater my dad wears which my grandmother made for him. Most people learn that way, it seems: initially from a family member, to pick it up again later as an adult. While I tend to go through phases (we’ll see if I’ll keep going when the weather gets hot, which is always the challenge around here), there’s rarely been a period of life when I haven’t knitted. I remember lurking in yarn stores in nearly every city I’ve lived. These days, it’s a consolation: something to do while sitting through a child’s music lesson, or at the end of the day while listening to a book or watching a show. Something, even with its novelties and challenges, which stays steady through the ups and downs of the day.
