It's never too late to blossom
A few thoughts on taking your time, on big projects, and on how knitting once again fills my heart
It’s the last days of summer and, here in San Francisco, we’re easing into our actual summer weather. It’s warmer than usual, sunnier than usual, with less fog than usual. I’m wearing shorts and a hand-knit linen tank top.
When the calendar page turns to September, I’m usually eager for autumn and cozy season; but, this year, I’m feeling a little different. Maybe you feel it, too?
I want to linger in these late summer vibes. Maybe it’s because the last few years have been heavy ones, full of change and isolation and my personal season of wintering.
Around this time, three years ago, I put the majority of my yarn business on pause. It stayed on pause for two full years.
I’m now in a season of greater work, and it feels meaningful to have learned how to stop, and also to learn how to start again without regrets. To just accept: this is my story.
Lingering in a season—whether it’s a personal season of doubt or success, or an actual season like summer—reminds me that time is the real luxury.
It’s not the plush vacations, or the expensive face creams, or the conspicuous brands, or the Instagram-ready kitchen. These things aren’t actually luxury, even though they do cost lots of money. Time is the real luxury: time to decide what you want to do. Time to spend as you wish. Time where you don’t have to work, you don’t have to strive, you don’t have to measure up. Time to simply be.
This is a gift that knitting (and maybe crocheting for you) offers, over and over again. The simple truth is that when I linger, when I take my time, when I knit something for myself, I’m saying that I matter. I’m worth taking time for.
In this world where we’re not billionaires, where we don’t own the company, where the vast majority of us don’t have generational wealth, time is what’s actually valuable. Time that we convert to labor in order to earn a living, to pay the bills, to do the sometimes overwhelming care tasks of keeping ourselves and our families afloat.
Time is the real luxury.
Time to take a long walk.
Time to sit with my beloved in the morning quiet and watch the birds.
Time to notice the slow changes that happen to the trees and plants in our backyard, as summer wanes.
Time to knit those luxurious cables that take more yarn and more time.
Time that so many of us wish we had. That we all deserve but which capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and all the -isms have conspired to rob us of.
Time to pause, hand over my heart, and take a deep breath.
Maybe you feel the same?
This has been a year of bigger projects for me, a year of rebuilding. I’ve been working on a 100 picture project to photograph every one of my Wardrobe Essentials colorways on every base, individually and together.
I’ve been testing all of my 100+ dyes to get a finer-tuned sense of how each color behaves.
I’ve been reworking previously-released knitting patterns to reflect what I’ve learned about usability and pattern writing.
It’s deeply rewarding to be able to go deep with creative projects. It’s what knitting and dyeing yarn shows me, time and again. That taking the time to persist through the inevitable periods of frustration, of not being very good at something, of ripping out and redoing, and of admiring my own handicraft … this is time well-spent.
Over the past two weeks, I’ve been dyeing, reskeining and getting ready to ship my Kindred Spirits yarn subscription club. As usually happens, I’ve fallen in love with this edition of the club and immediately cast on a new sock for myself.
No pictures just yet because I’m preserving the surprise for club members!
But, if you’re curious for a hint about the color, check out my inspiration board. I’ll share final pictures on Instagram this coming week once all the skeins have shipped, and, this color will also become the color of the season (late summer) for subscribers to order more, and for non-subscribers to order some at the regular price.
My Kindred Spirits yarn subscription gives me time to really dig into a colorway in a way that’s not possible for any other new colorway. Because I am dyeing more than a hundred skeins in a few concentrated dye sessions, I get to deeply understand how the dye behaves, how to manipulate it, or how to temper it for different external circumstances. I get to tweak it to my ideal color portrait—a bit more yellow here, a bit bluer there—and really experiment.
It’s concentrated and sustained observation. The kind of taking my time that the world doesn’t afford us very often. And the kind of creative investigation that is central (and not very profitable) for anyone doing any kind of art.
For this reason, and for so many others, I really love my club members and am so happy to be able to give them a discount on this special yarn. I pay for shipping, so club members end up getting the color of the season right as the season hits, and it’s on my very favorite (and most luxurious base), Cashmere Blend, at a ~$6 discount because they don’t pay for shipping.
If you’d like to join my yarn subscription club, I’m open for new subscribers until September 15. The open enrollment period comes around every two months, and it’s open now.
No matter how your life’s story is unfolding right now, whether you’re in a period of plenty or a period of scarcity, I hope that you are able to take a quiet moment or two with your knitting or crocheting and to just to be quietly with yourself. Time is the real luxury, and it’s a luxury I wish for you, and for me, in abundance.
Having just finished my chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer, I have especially learned to value my time over this past year. Many days I was too weak to knit or read so the days I was able to do either of those brought light to my days and joy to those times.
Fall is my favorite time of year. I don’t wish to linger in summer! But north central Illinois in the summer is usually hot and humid and buggy.
Today, though, has been glorious. Cloudless blue skies. Low humidity. Temps in the 70s. And the colors! We don’t get the brilliant fall colors until late October, but the soy beans are turning yellow, making the fields look like Monet borrowed Van Gogh’s colors. The corn is drying and turning brown. And tonight’s low is in the 40s!! Break out the sweaters!
Maybe it’s because my season of life is about struggling to accept aging, but these late summer/early fall changes when nature matures into such beauty before it returns to the dirt—I wish we as a society would see human aging the same way.
Granted I don’t feel glorious right now with my achy joints and my memory lapses, and I don’t see myself aging gracefully (I’m cranky most of the time), but I do wish I could find some way to come to terms with each season of my life.
I’m starting my Christmas knitting now—in part to avoid hurting my hands like I did last year and in part to have time to knit for myself during the holidays. I would love for that season to be slow knitting I can sink into. No grading. No students. No expectations. Just knitting.