Knitting may not appear to have much to do with this blog’s focus on books and writing, but stay with me, I’m gonna make the connection.
Back in October, I was in my LYS (local yarn store) buying yarn to knit a sweater for my brother’s dog, Rika. She’s a miniature dachshund, and the cutest thing alive. See for yourself — that’s a golf ball in her cute little mouth.
So I was at Yarn Forward, and another customer was being quite nosy about my purchases. I was buying Patons Decor yarn (an acrylic/wool blend) and a Patons pattern book to make this Fair Isle sweater.
This woman wanted to look at the pattern and the yarn, and asked all kinds of questions about Rika. I was trying to politely ignore her nosiness when she finally introduced herself as a writer for the Ottawa Citizen. She said she was writing an article about the upsurge in young people knitting (I told her my age, and apparently I still qualify as young!) and asked would I like to be interviewed. Sure, I said, and gave her my Adobe card.
Turns out the writer is Susan Lightstone, a writer with the Gordon Group, co-author of the best-selling book The Pig and the Python, and a contributor to Dropped Threads. Definitely a good person to do a favour for! We had a great chat when she interviewed me, and she wrote a jazzy article on knitting that appeared in the Style section of the Citizen.
All of this commotion got me very interested in knitting again. I made more frequent visits to Yarn Forward, and made my sis Joanna a scarf for Christmas. I decided it was time to make myself another sweater, since the last one was finished in 1996, so I bought some lovely handpainted wool. And I got hopelessly hooked on knitting weblogs. Here are a few of my favourites:
So I knit blithely on my ravishing blue sweater for about a week, and then I noticed that the colours were coming out uneven. There was much more turquoise on the lower portion of the back than the upper portion. Perhaps no one else would notice, but it bothered me (and my perfectionism was being stoked by all the perfectionist knitters [Becky at fluffa! is a prime example] who seem to do more frogging than knitting. I’m getting hip with all the knitting lingo — unravelling your knitting is called frogging because you’re going “rip-it, rip-it”.)
I discussed the problem with Shawn, but he thought I had done so much work that I shouldn’t pull it out, and he didn’t find the problem that noticeable. I reluctantly agreed, and finished the back of the sweater, and laid it out on a footstool. I kept looking at it that evening when I walked by, trying to make the colour discrepancy go away, but it just looked worse and worse.
Then with a flash of insight I thought, “Hey, I’m a writer! If I can throw out pages of writing, whole stories even, surely I can “revise” this sweater! What’s a few hours of work? Sometimes you can’t get it right until you get it wrong first!” I was so relieved! For the rest of the night, every time I looked at the sweater, I thought to myself, “I’m going to pull that baby apart and I’m so happy about it!”
Okay, so the comparison between frogging and rewriting is a bit tenuous. But it makes a lot of sense to me, and now I’m more motivated than ever to finish up an old short story, and to work on my Colourworks sweater!
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