10 Things I Learned From Knitting

1. Patience – Knitting anything takes a long time. In a world where I am used to instantaneous communication with friends on the other side of the world and same-day delivery of almost anything, it’s a good check on the ego to realize there are some things I can’t speed up.

2. Little things matter. Knitting is nothing more than a series of tiny stitches, made one at a time, building one upon another. It takes many thousands of them to make a sweater, a pair of socks, a blanket. That can seem like an insurmountable number. But if I keep doing the work, keep making those tiny movements enough times, eventually something marvelous comes into being. All great things were built this way.

3. Most things can be fixed. If I make a mistake in knitting, I can go back. I can change it. I can try again and do it differently. Understanding this makes me more okay with the possibility that I might not do it perfectly the first time.

4. But not everything has to be. There’s a saying in knitting: “Would you notice it from the back of a galloping horse?” There are many mistakes in my work that only I would ever notice, and probably lots that I never noticed at all. There is nothing that says my knitting has to be perfect, so I don’t have to waste time trying to achieve that.

5. It’s okay to try, and fail. The absolute worst knitting disaster imaginable costs me nothing more than my time and my yarn — and most often the yarn can be salvaged. So why not try the crazy three-handed quadruple cross backwards intarsia cast on? Maybe it’ll be a mess, but there’s a chance I’ll learn a new skill. Who is to say what failure is, anyway? Maybe I haven’t failed to knit a sleeve; maybe I’ve just invented a new way to decrease for a camera cozy.

6. There’s always something else to learn. When I got confident at the knit stitch, it was time to try purling. Then came increases and decreases. Once I could knit flat fabric, I could start to twist it into cables, or open it up into lace, or knit it in different colors. I could learn to knit it in the round, or backwards, or twisted-on-purpose, or to bind off and cast on in new ways. If I thought I had all of that down, I could look around and see what other creative things people were doing with their knitting, because people are doing new things with their knitting all the time: making new kinds of holes and textures, inventing new stitch patterns and complex cables, designing things that have never been made before. I will never get to the end of knitting. As long as I am interested in learning something new, there will be something new for me to learn.

7. There is more than one way to do something. I can hold the yarn in my right hand or my left hand. I can pick or throw. I can knit forwards or backwards, flat or in the round. All of it accomplishes knitting. I know fifteen different cast-ons, eighteen ways to join yarn, three ways to cable and nine ways to make an increase. And that’s without picking up a reference book or checking the internet, where I could find many more. I can’t think of a single thing in knitting that can’t be achieved in more than one way, and that means if a method isn’t working for me, there’s almost always another way to try.

8. How something got here matters. I can buy anything faster than I can knit it, and almost always less expensively. So why bother making it by hand? There are many answers to that: a desire to create; a preference for quality; a wish to make something utterly unique; a drive to shower those I love with gifts that are deeply personal. The act of making reminds me to consider the provenance of the things that I buy: What is the likelihood that someone has been paid a living wage to create this? Am I fortunate enough to be able to engage in conscious consumerism, choosing to support things I believe in with my dollars?

9. History has value. Everything we do, everything we have, is a result of those who came before. When I knit, spin, or weave, I feel a connection to the past, to the people who worked to refine these crafts through the ages, who made these same movements, learned these skills and passed them down. I feel their echo in my hands. I also feel connection to those contemporary mentors who taught me, guided me, and shared the lessons of their lifetimes with me.

10. People need connection, and knitters are really good at it. The modern iteration of knitting has always had a communal aspect to it. We met in coffee shops and libraries to knit together, we used the internet to ask for advice and read about each other’s projects. It’s no wonder we’re creating online fiber festivals and holding virtual knit-ins during these days of pandemic: Knitters are, as a whole, a creative and determined group of people who are good at making something of nothing. And maybe that’s the best lesson of all.

What have you learned from knitting?