If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll have noticed that I am generally opposed to knitting things twice. You’ll also have noticed me doing a lot of that lately. This morning as I hunted around the ol’ studio for projects wherewithal to show you, I realized everything new I’m working on right now is a secret. It’ll all come out in the next year or so, but for the moment the blog is rather strapped for content.
This is an opportunity, however, to wax poetic upon the subject of human imperfection. I am currently engaged in more than one “take 2” of my own patterns, and believe me, it’s not the cakewalk it sounds like. For instance, I had to reknit the saddles of my Silence Tee II because I managed to use the wrong needle size first time around. Then I flubbed the short row shaping so that the front of the tee had two left shoulders. Finally, I twisted the neckline cast-on three separate times when joining the shoulders. That’s not “I twisted the neckline once in three different places.” That’s “I had to undo and redo the neckline three times because I twisted the cast-on on three occasions.”
I’m also working on a sample of last year’s Quiet Bay MKAL for myself and royally messed up the corner shaping while doing the border. (I’m thinking about joining this year’s Autumn Dahlias MKAL, designed by my mentor, Tabetha Hedrick, by the way. Not that I need another project…but at least the math will already be done for me.) And finally, I’m in the middle of a secret adaptation of one of my old designs, and the calculations have pretty much got me by the throat.
The point is this, and I quote from St. Bernard: “The four most important virtues are humility, humility, humility, and humility.” Presbyterians of similar ilk to myself generally prefer Andrew Murray’s much more effusive take—something about humility being the soil in which other graces root and so on—but I rather like Bernard. (Maybe it’s my classical geekery; as much as I attempt to cultivate the four cardinal virtues, classically-educated Bernard’s obvious snarkery on said paradigm of virtues is too good to resist.)
Someone asked me a few years ago, “Is there anything you don’t think you could knit?” I immediately said “No.” It’s true in a sense; I have toolkit to make most things, albeit not without hair-tearing in certain cases. But if I were asked that today, it would be tempting to reply “Uh…my own patterns?”
A lot of people think that being a designer means that you’ve arrived as a knitter. Conversely, many people naively think that you’re a poor sort of designer if you don’t know everything; as a very new designer, I was terrified of being “found out” by the people who’d been knitting longer than I’d been alive. Learning to put my foot down and ask for some basic respect from those people was a journey in itself (and a subject for another day) but balance in all things is warranted. Having been on the receiving end of a “self-righteous ‘expert’ to youthful uninitiated” relationship, I don’t want to ever be on the giving end. Getting is all right would be lovely, but also probably overrated as far as personal growth is concerned. Because as irritating as it is to frog something where I “already know how it goes”, the reminder of my own lack of omnipotence is probably a good thing for my ego. While I am fully in favor of #knittingismyselfcare, maybe a bit of #knittingismysanctification wouldn’t go amiss? There should really be a better hashtag for it, though.
