Burn After Reading

Knit One
Purl One
Knit One
Purl One






There's nothing like a simple set of directions to a project to make you just throw in the towel before you even begin. I think I have spent years of my life avoiding certain things that I now find really enjoyable because I let the directions scare me into not trying. Certain activities have directions that may as well be written in Greek to me- like cooking, playing music, gardening, and knitting. I'll just muse on knitting here unless you have the next four years free to hear me out. The things is, I have now respectively tackled basic skills in three of the four but those skills didn't happen until I was willing to be brave and get on my own path. When it came to knitting, everyone told me the same few bits of advice. Do not use beautiful chunky or uneven yarns. Do not do more than one stitch on your first project. Do not use the method of left handed knitters- or the style many Europeans use. First of all, those beautiful and irregular yarns are just begging to be used- it's like choosing the Oreo over the Amish version of homemade chocolate cakes with cream filling. So unfair. Then there's the monotony of one stitch and the fact that I wasn't looking to bore myself to death. Lastly, I am left handed. This knitting thing was going to be difficult enough without my trying to turn ambidextrous. So I threw caution to the wind and just wung it. I recently realized I needed a good thick and long winter scarf because my Florida blood was clearly not up to Ohio's last winter freeze. I dutifully had pulled out my project book and found exactly what I was looking for. Only it wasn't. Again, the project called for that basic boring yarn, one stitch, and smallish needles. I thought clearly I would hang myself with the scarf before I even finished it. I parked the project for a few days. Then I happened to be in a yarn department and saw this beautiful green yarn in the same crazy texture I had done my son's hat in. The price is really inexpensive so I decided at this point there was no harm if the scarf didn't turn out. I then laid eyes on a pair of gigantic size 17 needles. That could help excite up the one stitch problem, I thought to myself, and dropped the needles into my purchases. I conceded on the one type of stitch and changed up the other two pieces of the directions. I read them through once more before beginning and then nicely shelved the book back in its place. I am now about a foot into this really pretty scarf and the big needles are making the stitches show the pattern and irregularity of the yarn really well. I have decided also that I will just knit this piece until the yarn runs out. I feel so much more relaxed in this project because there are no rules. No measuring tapes to keep getting out to agonize over how much more I have to go to completion, no stitches to count and make sure that I still have the same number of casts that I began with. There's something very liberating about getting a feel for a project and then making it your own. Now I wouldn't recommend this with everything- things like changing your brake lines in your car could be disastrous. More like it, would be disastrous. But a little leeway with things like knitting and cooking can have some surprisingly wonderful outcomes. I marvel now how knitting ever came to be in the first place. I'm not sure how long it would have taken me if someone just sat me down with a ball of yarn and a few sticks and said, "Here, make a sweater." Maybe one hundred years later I may have made something recognizable, I don't know. What I clearly do now understand, however, is that tearing out stitches ten or so times in the first hat I ever made has given me the insight on the mechanics behind the movements. I can now fix it if I mess it up and do not have to start over a new like I did with the hat. I also inadvertently learned to rib knit on that first project because even then I had changed something up right from the start. I knew after five or so rows that my project didn't look like it was supposed to, but the pattern was recognizable as other types of hats I had seen. Imagine my surprise when I learned that what I had been doing by accident was actually something I could make useful. I am about to embark on the musical thing once again. This has been a stressful endeavor as I have forgot how to read music as an adult. Then again, maybe I'll just learn to play by ear.