~*~Happy 2016~*~
I love the start of a new year, so full of potential. Knitting may seem — especially to others — like a small and inconsequential piece of our lives, with so many pressing, serious issues surrounding us. But, to me, it's a critical piece of the balance that makes my life meaningful. So I shamelessly celebrated New Years Eve, surrounded by family, food, champagne and my knitting.
I spent the evening with Drachenfels. Like many of you, I have a hectic life full of kids, work, cooking, care for an aging parent, and lots of other necessary tasks that limit my knitting time. I'm not the knitter who magics up a sweater in record time (although there was that 6 week period in which I managed to knit this sweater for my darling youngest child, even though the effort almost killed me). My works-in-progress often languish for months. It's a little bit frustrating to see other, even newer knitters, finish off projects so quickly and realistically, but one thing I have learned is to be realistic about my capacity as a knitter. I'm a working Mom, and a busy one at that. I love to knit. I would do it a lot more if I could. But I'm creative about fitting knitting into the space that I have and loving what I knit. In 2016, I'm not going to be an apologist for either the fact that I do make time to knit or that I don't have enough of it to be prodigious. I'm just going to be grateful for and enjoy what I have and can do.
This brings me to a corollary point. This year, I'm only going to knit things I love for people I love. This has pretty much been my practice for years now, but I'm going to explicitly own it this year. The cashmere yarn is not too precious to knit with. So I started out yesterday with a pair of Ice Scrapper Fingerless Mitts and a skein of Plucky Cashmere Sport in The Villager colorway. I stumbled across this skein while I was at the Plucky Shindig last year and spent a lot of time searching for more skeins in this gorgeous color, but it was, alas, a singleton. My one skein has stayed on mind as I've looked at a variety of potential new projects. I love this color and am happy to be knitting a pair luxury mitts that I can wear every day. This year, I'm knitting for family, for close friends, for myself and I'm going to use ALL of my favorite yarn. Life is too short to knit with cheap yarn. I'm going to knit with the good stuff!
Wishing each of you a happy new year full of your own decisions about what matters to you and how to get there. And, to end on the starting point: my knitting matters to me, which should be enough. But to be clear, in a world that is often full of hostility and violence, what could be more important than creating beautiful, useful things in a spirit of love? Without knitting, or whatever it is that brings each of us into a place of clarity and happiness, then the bad guys win. So I'm going to make the world a better place, one knitted object at a time.
