As winter gives way to spring it is easy to look around and see new beginnings. Small plants push their heads out of the ground and the trees blossom into new pinks, whites and lavenders.
Spring is a good time to think about knitting. What it means to be knitting. Why I knit, and why I love it so much. What it is about knitting that is so fulfilling.
I think anyone who knits and loves it will tell you something similar, though we all put it differently.
Making something from nothing
At bottom, knitting turns a length of string into a fabric. That is a small transformation and it never stops being satisfying.
There is something in watching a thing exist that did not exist before, made entirely by your own hands, from a material with no shape of its own. It is the oldest pleasure in any craft.
The rhythm
The repetition is the part that non-knitters misunderstand. They see monotony; knitters experience it as rhythm.
Once the movement is learned, the hands work without supervision, and the mind is free. Not empty – free. Problems get worked through, conversations get had, whole afternoons pass pleasantly.
It is the closest thing many people have to a meditative practice, arrived at without ever intending one.
Progress you can see
So much work now leaves no visible trace. Emails answered, tasks completed, nothing to point at by the end of the week.
A knitted piece is inarguable. It is longer than it was this morning. You can measure it. There is a particular satisfaction in work that accumulates visibly, and modern life offers less of it than it used to.
Patience, learned rather than possessed
Knitting cannot be hurried. A blanket takes as long as it takes, and no amount of urgency changes it.
That is a useful thing to be reminded of regularly. It also teaches a specific tolerance for going backwards – every knitter has ripped out an evening’s work and started again, and after enough times it stops feeling like a catastrophe.
The connection backwards
The stitches have not changed in centuries. Knit and purl are what they have always been, and the hands making them now are making the same movements as hands very long ago.
There is comfort in joining something that continuous.
And the objects themselves
At the end there is a thing, and someone wears it. It keeps a real person warm.
Handmade objects hold their meaning in a way bought ones do not. People keep them for decades, and hand them on. That is not a small thing to have made with an evening that would otherwise have passed unnoticed.
