art-un-rav-eled

Go around back to take a knit.
Come front to purl.
Go around back to take a knit.
Come front to purl.

This pattern has echoed through my past two evenings. I am ribbing. I am meditating: a lesson in patience.

This is my first time making a whole project with double-pointed needles. This is my first go at the rib stitch. This is my first time using 2.75mm needles and 3oz. yarn. I feel like I am making miniatures, when really, they're only mittens.

I tell myself that I need to be dedicated to finish my projects in time for Christmas. Every year I do this; I wait until after Thanksgiving to start holiday gifts. If I start any sooner, it just feels too rushed and unreal. I don't even look forward to Christmas. I just like to knit. Because it is December: month of late nights curled in a chair with a blanket and needles and yarnyarnyarn.

Go around back to take a knit.
Come front to purl.
Go around back to take a knit.
Come front to purl.

I started this mitten last night. I was lying on my  bedroom floor, trying to hold the thin needles without breaking them or poking out one of my eyes: I was close, trying to see each thread of each stitch pass through. The tips of my fingers began to turn purple--words of wisdom: lying down offers poor circulation when knitting. But I couldn't move; if I moved, I might drop a stitch or break a needle or lose my pattern. Thus far, starting on double-pointed needles is the hardest part, keeping the first row intact despite the obvious stretch between needles.

Then it kept going. The rows got easier as the thread got tighter between the needles, and the four main ones formed a square which birthed a circular cuff tailing behind: now I'm getting somewhere. I was able to sit up, even to hold the needles off my lap because I had figured out to adjust each so that the stitches would stay.

I noticed a lapse in the pattern within the first three or four rows. I was about 3cm in and so exhausted from starting that I wasn't about to turn back. Let's see how it looks later; maybe it won't be so obvious. Sometimes you really do have to just see how things work out: maybe you can trust yourself to write in pen, but sometimes, it sure is handy to have an eraser.

I kept knitting until I had a full 7cm cuff. Tomorrow's objective: beginning the stockinette stitching.

Go around back to take a knit.
Come front to purl.
Go around back to take a knit.
Come front to purl.

You guessed it: I haven't started the stockinette stitch yet.

This morning, I looked again at my work; I was proud that the ribbing looked so nice and was adequately stretchy. As I turned the piece in my hands, I got to those jumbled few stitches in the first rows. Not too noticeable... I turned it again and again. The splotch of mistake more apparent each turn: the imperfection on someone's face--a zit, a crumb, a stray hair-- that you can't help but look at as you talk to them. It just won't do. 

I resolved that tonight when I got home from work, I must start over, putting me one precious day behind.

Go around back to take a knit.
Come front to purl.
Go around back to take a knit.
Come front to purl.

Sometimes, when I'm focusing really hard or concentrating so much that I start to feel stressed, I will grit my teeth and clench my hands and feel my chest tighten--all reminders of how I lack patience, like how I always look to see how many pages are left in a chapter or seconds in a song and how the countdown is excruciating: by the end, my jaw sore, my fingertips white.

For this project, I am determined to push the "deadlines" aside and just let it become a relaxing rhythm.

After supper, I sat in my chair and looked at the cuff that was done so far. But it's so nice; there's only a tiny glitch. Maybe I could set it aside just to remember how pretty my first ribbing was. Maybe no one will notice if I keep going. But I knew that I would notice, and the farther I knitted, the harder it would be to accept the error.

There was no sense in wasting time thinking about it. I began to unravel the cuff in quick, bumpy rows.

This is one of the most challenging yet beautiful aspects of creation, of art: letting go. You make something beautiful, and you let it go. Sometimes it is by giving it away--the gift, as Lewis Hyde reminds. Sometimes it is by destroying it--as in pottery when you find an air bubble in the clay such that if you were to fire it, the explosion would destroy the pieces around it too, and you have to just flatten whatever beautiful object it was even though you worked hard on it.

And yet the beauty reciprocates. Sure, you sold a painting or a pot; you smashed the clay; you unraveled the yarn, but now, you get to start over. You get a blank canvas; you get a clean wheel; you get a full skein.

Go around back to take a knit.
Come front to purl.
Go around back to take a knit.
Come front to purl.

I am about 2cm in on my do-over mitten. I feel good about my decision to start again. Not only does it give me a chance to fix my mistakes, but it offers me yet another lesson in patience: casting on those double-pointed needles again.




I remember my Ceramics professor in Italy, Isabella Fazzo. I can see her: a thin tank top to cover her curved shoulders and tall physique, horn-rimmed glasses in bright purple, soft wrinkles still new to the corners of her eyes. She said she woke up one day, after years of being a chef, and decided that she was going to be a potter. "It was a time in my life when..." she would begin her stories, the ends of her words in sharp staccato from her accent. She ended each sentence with an inhaled laugh, just shy of a snort and with those back of the throat gasps--the kind of laugh that makes you smile at its unique charm, the kind where once you've heard it, you can recognize that person anywhere.

She told us about how, one year, she left her portfolio of all of the ceramic pieces she had ever done (photos, of course; they were all sold by then) on a bus, where it was picked up by a stranger and never returned to her hands. Instead of mourning it, she accepted the loss as a sign, "That time of my life was now over. I began a new style, different from everything I had ever made."

While difficult to achieve, acceptance is beautiful. Learning to start over, learning to see the opportunity in a missed stitch, in a new city, in an open future where you can wake up and decide what you want to be that day or any day: this is what makes us artists.