Okay, first of all, I am not nude underneath the shawl. As you go through the photos you'll see I'm wearing a top in...OMG what would you call this color (looking down at my shirt as I type)...it is so...color-less...let's call it "wet sand".
Knitting is a
great exercise in living and learning for me. This is the
Sunday Market Shawl. Last night, I was interacting with it pretty...aggressively. Bordering on violently, truth be told. I was not peaceful at all. This morning, I am taken aback. Struck by the lovely calm that descended when I wrapped this knitted project around my shoulders. Very Jekyll and Hyde.
This pattern has been on my radar for awhile. At first, because it is simple and easy. Soon after because I fell in love with the yarn used to knit it up (
Noro Cash Iroha). The factors that held me back: the finished shawl looked small to me, I didn't really love the finished look of the shawl, and the yarn was expensive. (I have had 2 skeins of the yarn in hot pink for almost a year, but this pattern was not the perfect match for those lovelies.)
Then, the Modern Yarn store closing blow-out sale. I bought 4 skeins of the yarn in this candy grape-y purple (called "Lavender") for the price of just over 2. This is when the pattern started flashing brightly on the radar.
Tension and gauge naturally, and mathematically, define how something you knit will turn out. Tension is how tightly or loosely you knit (or, more simply, how you knit) and gauge is how many stitches per inch you will get according to your personal tension and the thickness of the yarn you are using.
Most knitters make a swatch before starting a project to see what how their gauge compares to the gauge of the pattern desinger, in order to make necessary adjustments to create a finished object that is going to be close in size to the designer's finished object. This is critical if you're knitting something like a sweater. With fitted garments, knitters often wash and dry their swatches before they start actually knitting.
Me, I'm still not knitting swatches. Stay tuned to see if I do when I finally make a sweater.
However, I am not a complete dummy. And I have learned some things on this knitting journey. For example, I am a loose knitter. Ahem. My
knitting is loose. So, after reading through the notes of the dozens of folks who have knit this pattern and posted about it on
Ravelry, I decided to go down a couple of needle sizes to accommodate for this fact.
I didn't trust myself and knit more loosely than usual. I got to the end of the shawl and began the "laddering" step. This is the crux of the pattern. You drop every third stitch and the dropped stitch goes through the entire length of the shawl, opening up a column (which looks like a ladder). because you made yarnovers (extra stitches) every third stitch after casting on, the columns themselves don't unravel. It's clever.
Because I've never knit anything using this technique, and I didn't make a swatch, it was incredibly hard for me to visualize/understand what was going to happen. When I finally started the laddering, the opening columns were...ginormous.
So, I unraveled the whole thing and started over. (Not as terrible as it might sound. This is a really quick and easy knit. Also, I am a process knitter and learn by doing...and re-doing.) I decided to stay with the US size 8 needles, but knit as I would typically, which is comparatively loose, but not as loose as I was purposely knitting the first time. I also decided to cast on 10 additional stitches to make the shawl wider, and to use all 4 skeins. I wanted a shawl I could really wrap around myself.
Knitting it the second time, I noticed the knit was looking and feeling looser than I thought it would. (I just checked the suggested needle size for the yarn and it's 4.5mm-5mm. The US size 8s are 5mm.) I was also aware that I didn't love the color of the knitting that was unfolding. I liked it, just wasn't feeling the spark, if you will.
Late last night, as I was cracking up to
Harold and Kumar 2 (my awesome background entertainment), I got to the laddering and began that step anew. I immediately became frustrated because the columns that were opening up were much bigger than I thought they were going to be. Dealing with this kind of disappointment is paralleled in "real" life all the time. You think something is going to go a certain way and when it doesn't, you get upset. Our minds can get ahead of themselves sometimes and we alight on a future that defines our present (and our mood and behavior when the present and future do not match up) rather than staying grounded in the present, always.
I spent some time viciously attacking the columns and getting frustrated that I couldn't open them up fast enough. I was snowballing. Why did I think the laddering was supposed to be going faster than it was? Why was I so pissed that the columns were bigger than I thought they were going to be? Why was it important to me that the ladders look a certain way? Why was I attacking this beautiful and wonderful yarn all of a sudden? Crazy.
So, I put it down. Tucked it into the knitting bag and walked away. I was ready to walk away completely at that point and thought I might unravel the whole thing, rewind the yarn into a ball and put the yarn away.
Interestingly, I had insomnia last night.
This morning, I decided to finish laddering the shawl. I made it an exercise in meditation. When I felt myself starting to speed up or begin to handle the yarn too roughly, I slowed down and gentled myself. I took the time that was needed to undo each stitch, over and over and over as I worked through each column. I let go of my judgement of the size of the spaces forming between the "rungs". I let go of my judgement of the color of the yarn. I simply enjoyed the process and, literally, let go of stitch after stitch.
Then, I was done. It actually caught me by surprise. Done. I held the shawl up and out and thought it looked really nice. Not ugly, as I thought it did last night. I wrapped it aroud myself eagerly and it felt good. Warm, cozy, with a touch of cush. That's why I ended up taking so many pics. I couldn't get over how good it looked and felt.
There's still some learning ahead (isn't there always?) I will be blocking this which is going to make it longer and wider. It will be a completely different wrap, I think. But, it will always have knitted into it, my memory of the gifts I received while working on it.
You don't know till you know. Like, if I ever knit this again, I am going to go down another needle size or two. (Tha pattern calls for using US size 10s!)
When each new day feels like starting over, I know now that I am low on qi. When I come under siege, of self-inflicted attacks of doubt and judgment, I need to remind myself that the flow of my qi is not optimal. It has been so hard to start practicing again. At this point, I simply must get myself over this hump and let the self-healing and self-nourishment more truly set in.
