Mastering

Knitting has been a part of my life for a very, very long time – ever since I was about eight years old, when my parents took me to the local yarn store to learn how to knit.

I learned the basics, on big needles and with ugly yarn. I still have those needles – size 10 wooden circulars. It makes me smile to know how long I’ve had them, how many times they’ve moved with me. It is especially surprising to still have them when you consider the fact that I stopped knitting entirely in sixth grade. It wasn’t a question of being too cool, that is certain. There just isn’t necessarily time in an 11-year-old’s life for a meditative, time-consuming art.

I came back to knitting when I was about 24. I felt a need to create, and so I bought some needles and some yarn and re-taught myself the motions I remembered from so long ago.

I was, to be honest, still too busy to be a knitter. During those years I worked ridiculously long days (and nights) and threw myself into action, activity, motion. “Sleep when you’re dead,” I said. More than once. Even so, I learned how to knit lace and worked on progressively tinier needles with progressively finer yarn. I once spent an entire summer making an incredibly delicate scarf of merino and mohair. And then I ripped it out.

If I am honest with myself, it wasn’t until just about two years ago that I really, truly became a knitter. It happened when I stopped stage managing. And it has transformed my life.

Now, at the center of my artistic life, I have a pursuit that is my own. I never had this experience with theater, or music, or dance. Those were arts I lived in, breathed in, worked for – but in the end, it was always someone else’s vision I was making, whether it was a dance solo or setting light cues. Knitting, though, is different. I choose everything, from start to finish, and anything I do is entirely my own responsibility. There is no one else who can screw it up – and there is no one else who can fix it. There is gratification in this – it calls me to task when I am being lazy, and frees me from the opportunity to blame anyone else for my mistakes. Having that clarity has helped me to unravel the threads of other parts of my life – the parts of my life where I haven’t always been as clear-thinking as I could be.

So. All that being said, there is a piece that I have been working on for… a really long time. This is a shawl that I started working on last summer, as part of my goals for 2011. I set it aside in September when I started working on Christmas gifts, and didn’t pick it back up until right after the New Year. It was strange – and nice – to come back to this bit of work. An old friend, something I don’t have to strain my brain about while I do the pattern repeats.

Except. Do you see it?

Pardon how incredibly unblocked it is. When I finish, I imagine I’m going to have to block the HELL out of it to make it look nice. But no, that’s not what I’m referring to.

A few rows from the top of the work, I repeated a row of the pattern that shouldn’t have been repeated. And I didn’t notice until about six rows later. And then I came to a conundrum.

It is, in the much larger scheme of things, a fairly minimal mistake. Especially since the finished piece is for me, and probably no one EXCEPT me will ever look at it that closely. And frogging back six rows of a lace pattern is annoying and…and… and I had to fix it.

There was a time not very long ago when I wouldn’t have fixed it. When I would have shrugged and rationalized and moved on with the work and felt bad about it forever. It’s very likely that I would have abandoned it after just a couple more days of work, and then it would have joined every other unfinished project in my life’s collection of unfinished projects.

It took quitting what I thought was the core of my life in order to be able to see things like this. And it took quitting what I thought was the core of my life to realize that no, it wasn’t the core of my life. And for all of this, I am very, very thankful.

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