To Knit or Knot?

 To Knit or Knot

I love knitting, but it does not love me. Crochet is more my style. Knitting has a way of frustrating every bone in my wrists (take a moment to web search an image; there are more bones in the wrist than most people think). My mom was a knitter, and an amazing one at that. The stories of her projects and the lives they blessed are as numerous as her skeins of unworked yarn in the basement (yes, even after sending binfuls home with my eldest sister [hint to any family reading this: there’s more yarn to be had]).

Mom had many patterns because she loved trying new things, but there was one prayer shawl pattern to which she always returned. She loved knitting prayer shawls, and this was one of her signature patterns. The stitching is simple, as far as knitting complexity goes, but the loose and lacy nature of the shawl makes it extremely difficult. Mom loved it, though. Over the years, she perfected her rhythm and routine. She learned how the stitches looked and how they ran from row to row. If she made a mistake, she could divide the row onto her two needles, then use a third needle to unwork and rework a single wayward stitch in the middle of a row six rows back. Her skill was impressive, to say the very least.

And I thought, you know, the lingering Winter stinks. It makes me sad. There’s not enough sunlight. I thought… let’s just… knit a prayer shawl. It’ll remind me of Mom, I told myself; it’ll be productive, I told myself; it’ll be creative, I told myself; it’ll be a great distraction from the weather and work and taxes, I told myself.

So I picked up some needles to make one of these knit prayer shawls that Mom loved making. I’ve made a handful of them in the past and I know how to knit, so it’s not like I decided to do something completely out of my wheelhouse, like trigonometry.

Or is it?

I don’t know.

There are things nobody tells you about having children, like it doesn’t matter how many times you say, “That’s a no, Little Lady – we can’t play with knitting needles.” The Little Lady is going to play with the knitting needles.

Did that spoil the story?

Yeah.

And so we find ourselves despising Winter anew, wishing we had opted for a crocheted prayer shawl project to distract us from the gloom of the season. We stare at a half-finished shawl, dangling from a needle by three brave stitches (that leaves fifty-one I have to pick back up onto my needle, if anyone wants to know). We are too far done to not finish the shawl, and we are too far unraveled to risk touching anything. We have a stalemate, friends. I can’t knit; I can’t not; but if I don’t do something, it’ll surely end up a knotted mess.

From my heart to yours,