The "Want to"s vs. the "Have to"s
Lace never seems to look right at the time you’re knitting it. It hasn’t yet achieved the open, lightweight clarity I know it will gain when it is blocked. That’s not to say it isn’t pretty, but it isn’t yet beautiful. Knit-but-unblocked lace is the middle school girl of knitting; all the bones and shapes are there, but they haven’t yet settled in the right places.
I tackle my lace knitting with the potent strategy I use to tackle life: small steps lauched by the next right thing.
Some days a whole project like this looms too large for my mood or looks too demanding for my current energy. I gaze at a whole shawl and wonder where I’ll find the time to get all that knitting in. Or, other days, I’m swamped by the opposite--I see all that knitting and don’t want any of life to get in the way. What’s a DestiKNITter to do?
At times like these I break the whole shebang down into small segments with mini-goals. I set a goal of getting to the middle of this lace section, then set another to get to the end. I break every pattern row into stitch markers noting the repeats, etc.
Since deadlines are a part of my everyday writing existence, I have only one test for how fast or far to go in my knitting goals: If it feels like work, stop.
Sure, I write about my knitting here, and I do set schedules and deadlines for myself, but I will blow off those deadlines if the sheer pleasure of yarn between my fingers starts to fade. The way I see it, if I’m not having any fun, you won’t have any fun.
Keep in mind that hard can still be fun. Challenging can still be pleasing. I just want to make sure the “want to”s of my knitting never collide with the “have to”s that rule the rest of my life.
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