THERE ARE, I HEAR, knitters who are happy, relaxed, and accepting of all things in their knitting. When a hand-painted yarn “puddles” while she knits it so that all of the blue falls squarely upon the right breast (and only the right breast) of her sweater, she can smile and enjoy this random element of a random yarn. When a pattern with bobbles turns out to have a cluster that falls directly on her midsection, the relaxed knitter doesn’t rip it back while fuming with indignation about how not a single person alive could look attractive with seven woolly belly buttons. This sort never rips back a sleeve cap nineteen thousand times because she has not yet achieved perfectly matched decreases, and she’s seldom seen thumbing knitting books at 2 AM with a scotch in hand, driven to drink by her failure to generate a purl stitch that’s perfect in all ways.
No, no, these knitters are easygoing. When a self-striping yarn makes a pair of socks that are fraternal rather than identical, they don’t start over. If they run out of yarn at the end of a project, they might use another color and thoroughly enjoy the resulting stripe. They’ve never once set fire to a project as punishment for persistently possessing the wrong gauge after seven real tries. When it all goes wrong for this sort of knitter, they smile beatifically and say serenely, “It will fit someone.”
Not even in a dark moment has this knitter sent a knitwear designer a victim-impact statement describing in precise detail the ramifications a small pattern error had on their lives. (They have especially never done this drunk at 3 AM.) They have never shoved a project into the back of the linen closet, needles and all, and pretended to the rest of the world that it never happened. They don’t tell people that a difficult yarn was stolen out of their car, and they’ve never burned a baby blanket at midnight because it didn’t come up to standards.
These knitters are knitting for the joy of it. They aren’t driven to create perfect knits or master every technique that they hear about — or at least if they are, they aren’t sobbing and destroying evidence while they do it. These knitters have a relaxing hobby, and these knitters take pleasure in all that they create.
I am not one of them, though I meet them all the time, and the funny thing is that they seem just as fulfilled by their imperfect knits as I am by my pursuit of near-perfect ones. I guess I could chalk it up to personality differences, but I think it’s something else, another thing that knitting has taught me: The act of knitting is unlike almost any other human activity in that two people who are as different as camels and cantaloupes can take the same pattern and the same yarn and do their own thing with it, and both of them can walk away happy. If you are the sort who is relaxed about your accomplishments and simply enjoys the lovely act of working stitches without pressure, knitting is perfect for you. If, on the other hand, what makes you happy is rising above challenges and doing it with precision and obsessive perfectionism, then you’ll love this business of sticks and string just as well.
Remarkably, knitters can shape the same hobby, the same techniques, and the same equipment to meet their personal need for perfection. There’s more than one right way to knit, and you don’t have to be perfect or even good at knitting to have it work out for you. That’s pretty unusual, because there really aren’t a whole lot of other hobbies where you can relax, be imperfect, and still have a wonderful time … just ask rock climbers.
5 things
WORRYING NON-KNITTERS
HAVE WARNED ME ABOUT
1 Knitting needles are very pointy. I could put out my eye at any moment.
2 If I were knitting while in a car and there happened to be an accident, I could be impaled or even killed by my own knitting.
3 If I am not very, very careful, I or someone else could become entangled in my yarn and be unable to elude or escape danger.
4 If I am a victim of a crime or terrorism, my knitting needles could be grabbed and turned against me as a weapon.
5 If I’m sitting and knitting in the presence of children, one of them could run into my knitting while playing and be impaled, have an eye put out, become entangled or, heaven forbid, all of the above.
Over the past thirty-four years as a knitter, I’ve been warned about these possibilities many times by many different non-knitters with some degree of variation and I have to admit, it makes me a little nuts. Everything is dangerous if you think about it (especially if you have an imagination), and most things are way more dangerous than knitting.
In 2006, National Geographic published a “ways to Go” chart, which spelled out the odds of someone dying as a result of various turns of events. (Naturally, the National Geographic people admitted that the chance of dying is 100 percent; it’s only how you go that was examined.) According to the chart, for instance, the chance that you’ll die of cancer is 1 in 7, but being killed in a motor vehicle accident ranks 1 in 84. Accidental electrocution is pretty dangerous at 1 in 9,968. There’s a 1 in 62,468 chance that you will be killed by legal execution, which turns out to be (rather unbelievably) more likely than dying in a flood, which is 1 in 144,156. Although I’ve experienced very small injuries as a knitter, and once my husband took a needle to the foot when I left a sock in progress on the floor, in my lifetime of knitting I’ve never, ever, not even once heard of a knitter who lost an eye, was treated for a life-threatening impaling, or was actually killed by her knitting. I think it might be time for non-knitters to stop worrying quite so much about the vague and imagined dangers of the hobby and start to be concerned about the real dangers of knitting: moths, running out of closet space, and addiction.