Townet

“Before embarking on any course of action, it’s always useful to question why you’re actually doing it, what you’d like to get out of it and how you feel about it.” (Conscious Creativity, Philippa Stanton)

I knit a lot. I know what I’m doing, I know how to fix mistakes in ways that don’t always include tinking or frogging, I’m never intimidated by a pattern or technique, and I aspire to try anything….

Around a year ago I found myself appraising my obsession with knitting. It has been an ongoing process, with intermittent progress – the cha-cha of one step forward two steps back – and some of the stasis doesn’t bother me at all because I had no idea how deeply affected I would be by the loss of my greyhound familiar last March. Comfort knitting, process knitting, easy knitting got me through.

I’ve been looking at my knitting output for 2019, and I’m happy to see that I ended the year with more finished objects than the previous year. I also ended the year with fewer UFOs than I had at the start of the year when I went through my projects and made a list of UFOs, and frogged and let go of several things I knew I had no intention of finishing.

Kindness to myself over my grieving aside, my knitting output doesn’t reflect my knitting dreamer. Too easily I find myself knitting characters and softies, and following patterns, when what I really want to do is experiment, follow through on design ideas, and stretch my creativity. More of the attempts at glove designs (above, awaiting formal pattern writing, and the other glove construction), more experiments with dying yarns, more sock knitting…

So my current knitting mojo is directed at finishing things and clearing the deck for a more intuitive and experimental knitting adventure. I have finished five projects so far this January, I have fourteen to go. I have no doubt that characters will still appear, I have a young nephew who hankers after them, but I’d like to see more of me in my knitting by the end of the year.

Today I’m finishing a shawl/poncho that I cast on in 2017. Casting on a knitting project always involves a bit of dreaming about how the knew thing will look, and I remember imagining a cool, dry autumn day walking on the beach with my boy and my poncho that can be worn three different ways…

Last night I found a greyhound hair part woven into the fabric. In other years I would have sighed and removed the hair, but last night I tucked it in a little more securely. I found some buttons online that look like my boy, so I bought them. It won’t be the same.

Townit [I. ˈtʌunət] n. Also townet, tounet, -nit. The preparation of yarn by the carding and spinning of wool. The manufacture of woollen thread. The material so processed. A piece of knitting. Women’s work in general. Dictionary of the Scots Language. 2004. Scottish Language Dictionaries Ltd.