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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