Skill + 1UP

This is the second topic of seven for this week.

Look back over your last year of projects and compare where you are in terms of skill and knowledge of your craft to this time last year. Have you learned any new skills or forms of knitting/crochet (can you crochet cable stitches now where you didn’t even know such things existed last year? Have you recently put a foot in the tiled world of entrelac? Had you even picked up a pair of needles or crochet hook this time last year?

I waiver between knitting as a process and knitting as pure relaxation and entertainment. I see what skills others are blogging about, or those that have set daily/weekly/monthly goals. I listen to podcasts of people who relish reading through a technical knitting book. (I tend to use them for reference only.) I sometimes often feel guilty because I think that I'm not learning more or enough. In my non-knitting life, I'm known for burning the candle at both ends. (Not that this is a good thing.) I feel like a slacker that I'm not doing the same with my knitting.

But then I talk myself off the ledge. I am not about to let my knitting become a competitive sport. Or become work (unless I win the lottery, quit my job, and open my own LYS).

Every knitting project contains lessons for the knitter. Even if one would spend the rest of one's life knitting scarves, things can be learned in that process - how different yarns work in different stitch patterns, color theory, splicing or joining various fibers, how different needles made of different materials feel with certain yarns, etc. It may be the simplest, no-brains pattern but something can be learned from it. It's the learning that comes from experience.

There are many things I hope to learn. Someday I will knit an Alice Starmore sweater and a Sharon Miller shawl. Someday I will learn to knit continental, intarsia, entrelac, double knitting and fair isle. I'm learning to knit socks now and hope to finish my first pair by the end of April. These are cuff-down; my next pair will be toe-up. I hope to be still knitting and still learning when I'm in my 90's.

Lately, my non-knitting reality has been difficult enough. For now, I want my knitting time to be an enjoyable, stress-free zone, free of the I must or I have to. Free to knit what appeals to me at the moment, not dictated by self-imposed stress.