Knitting can show us how to live gently

You can always start again

One of the things I love most about this newsletter is sharing an idea or an artist whose work has felt especially nourishing to me over the past week.

Today, that’s Morgan Harper Nichols, an artist-poet who has a recurring theme in much of her work: all along you were blooming. This thought has been particularly powerful for me this week.

This year, 2023, is my tenth year of a running a small business in the niche yarn industry. In these ten years, I’ve had booming times, with demand that outpaced my ability to create, and slow times, where it felt like no one knew about me or wanted my yarn. I’ve often wondered why other businesses, started around the same time as mine, seemed to grow effortlessly from online shops to brick and mortar stores, while mine stayed small. I’ve had years where my business has contributed meaningfully to my family’s income, and I’ve had years where I haven’t drawn a salary, at all.

Right now, I am in a quiet place: my business is still very small, smaller than it’s been since the early years, and I am also nurturing the sense that I, as Morgan Harper Nichols describes, may have been blooming all along.

This idea is a gentle and powerful one—that all along we are blooming, even when it feels like we are being left behind, or going too slow, or are feeling unseen. As Morgan writes, “This journey of going deeper is a journey worth taking.”

The pandemic years broke me in a way that, for a long time, felt as if I might not come back together again. The uncertainty and fear and loss and, well, just all of it.

But all along I was growing.

Right now, I am in a quietly liminal space of seeing just how resilient I was—how we all were—and how all along we were growing and going deeper, even when it didn’t feel like it.

I often share, here, my preference for going small and slow. What I mean, when I say this, is that going slow and recognizing and seeing the small moments of joy, the small items of beauty, the smallness of my life, has been huge and life-giving for me.

All along we were blooming.

There are times of seeming to be fallow, where it looks like nothing is happening— but maybe these are times when our roots are growing, roots that are reaching deep to find sustenance. It may not look like much from the outside, and we may see others around us who are flowering and growing tall, but we are still here, still growing, still reaching for the deepest parts of ourselves.

Doing this, reaching deeper, is so beautiful. For you and for me.

You can learn more about Morgan and her work at:

• Her website

• Subscribe to her app, the Storyteller, which gives you a daily dose of poetry and art

• Buy something from her shop, Garden24

• Listen to her podcast

When knitting seems to go backwards

Look under my arm to see just how much I miscalculated the way this yarn and my knitting gauge was going to influence the armhole depth.

One morning this week, I was thinking about my lovely Mile Road Tank, recently finished and photographed so I could share pictures for the test knit.

What you didn’t see in the pictures I shared earlier, is that I need to modify the armhole depth to make this tank something I reach for every day.

It’s no fault of the pattern; just an impact of my yarn substitution and an impact I couldn’t quite predict before the knitting. I like a 9-inch deep armhole, and this particular yarn blend (linen and silk) stretches with wearing, even though it’s light as a feather. If I was using cotton, I would have predicted the growth, but I didn’t know how this light fingering weight linen/silk was going to behave. The 9-inch armhole I intended to knit became an 11-inch finished armhole.

Friends, this project was a lot of knitting and ripping back to make the modifications I need to make is also going to be a lot of knitting. I don’t relish ripping out; I much prefer finishing projects and seeing progress to going backwards.

As I often say, it’s just knitting. But it’s also a canvas for me to go deeper.

Redoing something can feel like going backwards. Redoing can feel hard, and it can feel like starting over. Redoing can feel like all the progress, all the things you’ve learned, all the ways you’ve grown, aren’t enough.

But, reaching deeper, shaking off the external views, I know they do matter.

All along we were blooming.

The story of this tank top is just a longer story that I thought it was. The “finished photos” I took were actually in-progress photos.

This shows me, in a really visceral way, that our stories are never quite finished, in the best and most hopeful sense. We can always begin again. We can always re-do. We are still blooming, even when the blossoms aren’t yet visible.

This week’s yarn offering

I have something a little different for you today. This fall, I’ll be introducing a new yarn base, a Merino-Rambouillet (superwash) DK. I have a very small number of pre-release skeins to share. They are in prototype colorways, gorgeously rich and saturated, and will make spectacular hats and mitts for the fall. (I have a feeling they’ll make great sweaters, too, but that story is still unfolding. 😉)

Be gentle with yourself

No matter how the week ahead of us unfolds, I hope you will find moments of gentleness and calm—and know that your story, too, is just unfolding. Whether you find yourself in grief, enjoying warm sunshine on your face, or in the disappointment of frogging stitches, I hope you find space to be gentle with yourself.

PS: There will be no newsletter or yarn offering next week because I’ll be rejuvenating with family for some summer lake time. It’s my first time taking a pleasure trip since 2019, so even though it’s pleasure, the once-loved process of traveling is sure to be different in post-Covid times.