Monday, January 08, 2007

Knitting Content

Or, contented knitting? This is for Becca, sort of. Lately all I want to do is knit. Why do I love knitting, you ask? Well, there are many reasons. (How helpful that imaginary interlocutor is!)

1. It is not wasteful. You buy the yarn, you knit it. If there are leftovers, you can knit something else with them. (Yes, there is a stash, and yes, it is overflowing. But it will be knit into something, really.)

2. It does not go bad. For some reason all the avocadoes I buy, and some of the lemons, go bad before I cook with them. This does not happen with yarn, though it does on occasion go out of style.

3. It is very forgiving. Even if you have to start something eight times, you can always rip it out and start again. In fact some of my stash yarn is ripped-out projects. Lest you begin to feel that this is some kind of vicious cycle, be assured that it is not: every project I've knitted, even the ones I ripped out (probably especially those), taught me something. (My dissertation director said something like this to me about the various false starts on my dissertation, but I have yet to make any use of the things I learned about orphans during the unfortunate middle period of that project...)

4. You get nice things at the end of it.

5. It redeems all sorts of otherwise "lost time." I mostly knit while watching otherwise forgettable television, but also during unavoidable kid-related waiting times. It's (gasp!) better than a book for this kind of thing because you--or I, at any rate--are a little less likely to get lost in it. Also I get carsick if I read in the car, but not if I knit. [edited to add: this requires actually bringing the project along, of course. I was early to pick Nick up this afternoon and didn't have my knitting. Lesson learned. Maybe.]

6. Yarn shops are fun.

I'm sure there are more reasons, and I'm also sure that these are not terribly original. But I'm three pages into an overdue article (writing, not reading, alas!) and I needed a break.

6 comments:

Becca said...

Good reasons. I don't think I've gotten to the stash stage. I mean, I have a bunch of yarn, mainly project leftovers, and the last thing I made was a scarf from yarn I found in the box, but I never think "Oh, let's see what yarn I have and what I might make with it..."

Heather said...

I actually finished a knitting project over break... from (cringe) this summer... Except that I got so excited about finishing it (and ran out of yarn and was too scared to buy/tie in more) that I sort of finished it early, so it is very fat and not very long and all-around relatively impractical... but semi-functions as a shoulder wrappy thing, sort of... You've got to start somewhere, I guess...

Libby said...

I don't have much of a stash, Becca, but I do have some random skeins that were more than I needed for a project, and some that I bought thinking of a particular thing and then didn't use them...and I have things people have given me. So, it's a stash. And, yes, Heather, exactly!

Anonymous said...

I have a cure for ever forgetting your knitting again. I have a small knitting bag in the car with everything I need to make a sock. When I finish the first sock of a pair I make a mental note to put more yarn in the bag incase I finish the second sock and am stranded without a knitting project. (I know, that sounds a tad addicted)

Magpie said...

I've had a knitting bug recently, but I'm a rank beginner. I did raid my mother's stash for odd ugly scraps to practice with, and I'm on a hat roll - just started a second one. I need to get a little better, so I can tackle something other that infant sized hats of scraps, but it's doing it for me at the moment.

L said...

These are all excellent reasons. I'll need to find an extremely patient "teacher" if I decide to take it up.