For the past week I’ve been knitting a new project. I’ve had this beautiful yarn in my stash for a few months and I finally figured out what I wanted to do with it. The colors look like a watercolor painting, and it reminded me of water, and waves. So I found a stitch pattern that looked a bit like waves. It’s called Ripple.
I decided to make a cowl/neckwarmer. But I knit the first round, rather than knitting the stitch pattern. And so the bottom curls up. It most likely would have rolled up even if I had followed the pattern from the cast on stitch.
I got quite a lot done yesterday sitting in my yard in the hot sun. There were tons of airplanes out, that familiar airplane noise loud overhead. The kind that makes you look up despite the blinding sun to locate the plane. It was the perfect August afternoon.
I’ve made a few mistakes with this cowl, but then again, nobody’s perfect. I thought I had been knitting the correct pattern for a while, but I think I got off track, because when I corrected my mistake the rest of the cowl started to look much different than the previous section I’d done. It still looks pretty, and I’m the only one who will see the errors.
One could learn a lot from knitting. In life we often make mistakes, things that don’t work out as we’d like. But often we’re the only ones who would ever see what we did. We can’t pretend these things never happened. And it would be better if we remembered all of our misgivings and errors. It is through these small failures, so to speak, that we can see a different way of approaching things. A better way of going about the day to day life we lead. Our errors bring about beauty in us; make us stronger people.
It is the same with knitting. The errors, mistakes, will be there. If we knit everything absolutely perfectly it would lose character. The homemade charm would be gone. I think I unconsciously try to mess up at least a couple times with every project I do. Just so that it has flaws. Because we need our flaws. We need our unique differences. And a knit garment also needs to be different, so it sets itself apart.
This is not your ordinary wave stitch cowl. It’s a cowl with character. And it’s messed up. But it’s mine.