On Trusting The Process

Knitting, Not Joel Embiid (though maybe also Joel Embiid)

The dream (for more such adorableness, pop over to Mochimochiland)

For years in early adulthood, I knit all the time. It was one of my favorite hobbies. And then life got in the way. I boxed up my yarn and notions and meant to revisit them many times over the years and just…didn’t and somehow nearly 15 years had passed, and then I woke up one morning last fall and decided I’d try it again.

I’d long wanted to knit a version of a cardigan my grandmother made for me, one with little owls cabled into the yoke, and one of my favorite knitting experts had written an updated version of it as a pullover. Best of all, I had some chunky charcoal gray yarn that would be perfect for the project! I swatched, I cast on, I was off to the races.

Once I’d knit it up about halfway, though, I realized I’d miscalculated the yardage, and had bought the yarn so long ago, I’d need to buy the replacement yarn from a different dye lot. I was incredibly lucky that the yarn is still in production at all, nevermind in the same colorway. But it was! And that took some of the sting out of the only solution, ripping it all out & starting again.

When I started writing this letter, I thought I might write my way into a modestly grand philosophical conclusion, but that isn’t what’s happening. I’m just telling you that I messed up my project, unraveled it all, ordered the yarn I needed to get it right, spent a very meditative afternoon with my family using my long-languishing swift and ball winder to wind the old & new yarn into a bunch of new double-stranded center-pull yarn balls, and have been re-knitting my sweater.

It stinks to have realized so far into the project that it was unsalvageable in its current state, but once I decided what I had to do, it turns out that that was a lot easier than arriving at the painful, annoying, faintly mortifying conclusion in the first place. And the knitting itself is still fun — it’s nice to be reminded that I can create actual wearable fabric from yarn, that reading and using a well-written knitting pattern is a lot like cooking from a good recipe, and that the value of what I’m doing rests as much in the doing of the thing as in the final product itself.

Of course, this process I’ve been remind myself to trust has taken months — I realized the yardage problem somewhere around Thanksgiving — but trusting it hasn’t steered me wrong, and that’s worth remembering, too.

PS: this newsletter is firmly pro-Joel Embiid, and if you haven’t listened to this episode of Reply-All (and also this follow-up) that focuses on him, it’s well worth your time!