I did indeed make a pilgrimage to a yarn shop in Ohio’s ugliest city, and am sad to report that while it is nice, it was certainly not worth the incredibly bleak drive to get there. I picked up some yarn and a set of new shiny ebony needles for a fairly reasonable price.
So post-yarn-shop the question had become “What…do I knit with this?” It was to be a hat for the team gift exchange, for the Office Job. But once I got done knitting and blocking it…a curious thing happened.
Would you view an ugly photo of a nice (I think) hat taken with my ancient digital camera? Of course you would!
Plz to note my “do not fuck with me” shears. They are love.
Oh ho. Probably not the tightest color work on the first few rungs as I was experimenting with the idea of carrying one color in each hand (didn’t work, hands got way tired) but I should think it’s not a horrifying hat. I had great fun charting it in cobalt and white to look like a cut glass vase I saw. It should fit a head of normal size…
But now I can’t bear the idea of giving it away. And it’s not because I find it particularly enchanting or good…
I have run across another bout of acute knitting self consciousness.
Let me explain. When I was in London I toted along a ball of blue Opal sock yarn and a set of regrettably brittle birch needles, but I only occasionaly knit on it. The purpose of this yarn? A pair of socks for Dadzilla.
Why? Because upon displaying my ever-so-complicated intarsia in the round New Orleans socks he looked puzzled and disdainful and said “Can’t you get those for 3 bucks at Walmart?”
I know you knitters have heard this before. It’s pretty fucking crushing isn’t it? When you love to knit so much, the terror of having your knits languishing unappreciated in the back of a drawer is paralyzing. This may largely be why I knit for myself and my sister whom I adore because she happily gobbles and models up any whimsical experimental projects I can turn out – like the sailor tattoo hoodie I embroidered to alleviate winter boredom.
These socks were going to turn it all around – Dadzilla would learn the wonder of hand knit socks and see why I spent my precious hours clicking away with little sticks and string. It sounds soppy, but he might even see me – as I am – in my work. Neurotic or not I consider my work a representation of myself. The things that come out of the labor of my hands are precious to me and it was shocking to have my work dismissed as superfluous and pointless.
I started the socks while I was in London and knit and knit, scrutinized the pattern, and had an EPIC freak out once I got home. The sock wasn’t absolutely perfect –and who could wear a sock with a mistake in it? Sobbing (and in the midst of a panic attack), I frogged the half-sock and retreated to the comfort of the less-than perfect boot sock I was knitting for myself.
A few days later some measure of sanity returned to me. Rampant sock frogging is not normal behavior for me. I have a strict rule about knitting being a place where I can be free to make mistakes and wing it. But the idea of exposing a flaw or weakness in myself by presenting an pair of socks to my Dad with a mistake or flaw was…out of the question when I was feeling vulnerable and exposed in the wake of a failure. Especially considering that I have struggled alongside my father to establish a good relationship despite our personality and ideological differences, and admittedly I still harbor lot of old fears about living up to family expectations. And we are a family who prides themselves on gift giving skillz – you don’t ever ask what they want, you observe and strike with precision…
Two months later I completed the socks.
And they are not perfect, but I think they’re nice. They certainly will be warm (for anyone who might be curious that’s from Nancy Bush’s “Knitting Vintage Socks” a gentleman’s shooting stocking in lozenge pattern modified to be a nice normal sock) So I folded them up and tucked them into my knitting bag and turned to the hat – which flew off the needles in the matter of a week.
And when it was done I looked at the hat and wondered – can I expose myself to my coworkers like this? Can I present my own work at a gift exchange and not have a mild heart attack wondering if it’s going to be a pity take and then tucked away in a closet never to be worn again? A more confident knitter might present the hat nonchalantly and click away on the next project, happy to see the end of it, but I am not a confident knitter, I am a neurotic perfectionist.
Or should I sod it, knit a matching pair of mittens from the spare yarn and put the hat in the donations box bound for Akkol where I absolutely know that the hat will be keeping a child’s head toasty warm in the Kazakhstani cold?
I may just go and snag a L’Occtain gift basket for the coworkers and save the knitting for the people who need it and will use it. It could be that this is all just philanthropy as a bandage for my damaged ego, but sod it.
And in the spirit of knitting allowing for mistakes here is a photo of a pair of socks I am knitting in spare moments out of “Black Purl” in a rejigged lace pattern from Vogue Stitchionary for the helluvit. There are at least 70 mistakes, if not more, and I don’t care…because you can’t tell!
