All Tangled Up

I tell knitting students that all we knitters do is take perfectly good string and tangle it up. The trick is to tangle it so that it becomes something pretty. I also tell them that knitting is a little window into their psyches. Some people are process knitters; some people are outcome knitters. Some are linear and must finish one project before moving on to the next. Others, not so much with the one at a time thing. You get the idea.

Ahem. Physician, heal thyself. Or, teacher, teach thyself, I suppose. I have this project. I'm making a round shawl. Making a circle is just pi x r-squared, after all. It turns out, though, that the arithmetic to get that to happen with yarn is a little interesting; Elizabeth Zimmerman worked it out for us ages ago. I am so very not a shawl girl. I would love to be the person who wears shawls and flow-y skirts and who strolls through the English garden. What I actually am, though, is the bike-riding, rock-climbing, yoga girl with scraped knees and bruises up and down her right arm from the belay rope. (Could I use a shawl to cover the scrapes and bruises, you suppose?)

Nonetheless, there is this shawl. It's going to be a wall hanging above our bed. I thought it would be cute (if only to me) to have a math-fiber arts thing of beauty in our room. I've been knitting for a really long time. I actually knit a lot of lace. I know that lace before you block it looks like the dog's breakfast, rather than the hoped-for thing of beauty. But I may have outdone myself this time. Here it is on the needles:

It's really a sort of heathered pink; I don't know why it looks purple. Anyway, it's fairly revolting at this point. The trick is to maintain confidence that the laws of physics have not been revoked. I will block this mess and it will become beautiful -just like the test swatch before it. Right???

And if I do that, then surely I can take the tangled mess that is my life and turn that into something of beauty. Because knitting is a metaphor for life, right?

(Yes, I see that there's a logical flaw there. Hush. I'm trying to instill some confidence here....)

Tags: knitting