When to let a WIP go, and when to go back to it

These are good life lessons, too

A few weeks ago, I returned to a project that had been on hold for three years. Three years, friends. There are lots of good reasons why it got delayed in the first place, none of them the fault of the project. It wasn’t hard to knit, it wasn’t boring. I didn’t lose interest, and my tastes didn’t change. But it wasn’t the right project for the time of life I found myself in.

This project started in 2020 during the first, really hard part of the pandemic. I found myself really wanting to design a sweater—for all the same reasons I originally started dyeing yarn. I wanted to immerse myself more deeply in the process of creating. I had ideas about how I wanted a sweater to fit, how I wanted it to feel on my body, and how I wanted it to embody the feeling of cozy home life. I knit my first sample. I took a master class on how to grade sweaters. I worked intensively with a technical editor to figure out how to make the idea on my needles work for a wide range of sizes.

This is me, in that sweater, at the farm of a family friend in early spring 2021 (no vaccines yet, just fear and hope):

Nearly 30 amazing knitters (including some of you reading this very newsletter today) volunteered to test knit the sweater. Soon after the test knit started, I broke my foot and had to delay the test, but those amazing knitters stuck with me and eventually modeled their finished sweaters for me in the heat of late summer 2021.

And then I just couldn’t.

A full year of the pandemic, four years of a Trump presidency, the most fraught election I’d ever lived through, an insurrection, just all of it. It opened up old fissures and chasms in my nervous system (those of you who also have childhood ACES will understand, and those of you who don’t, I am so glad you don’t, and I think you’ll understand too, because those particular pandemic days were hard)—and I just couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything new and I couldn’t do anything more.

We all love a good before and after story, but this isn’t one of them.

I took time. I took more time that I thought I’d need. I slowed way, way down. I ran my yarn business in a way that worked (and still works) for me, right now, and I learned how to calm my nervous system. I expanded my toolbox of ways to care for myself and my family and life got much much smaller.

I also knit a lot of sweaters. I made new industry connections, I took classes, and I read books.

And then, one day a few weeks ago, I wanted to pick that project back up again and infuse it with all the new, slower, but still a work-in-progress, parts of myself. And I did.

I got some help (from the lovely Jen Parroccini) on how to adjust a few of the fit issues that showed up in testing, I regraded (and rewrote) the pattern based on the new things I’d learned, I knit myself a new sample for my current body size, a friend and colleague knit a second sample in a different size—and this project has become yet another life lesson, courtesy of knitting.

I could have closed the door on the project. Left it as a WIP (work-in-progress), or even ripped out and reclaimed the yarn from my original samples. And that would have been a perfectly valid way of moving forward. I could have rewritten and reknit the pattern (as I did) and that, also, is a perfectly valid choice.

There are no wrong choices in knitting. There’s just what’s right for me, right now.

Having longstanding WIPs—projects you cast on, enthusiastically work on for a little while and then put aside—isn’t a moral failing. WIPs are morally neutral. Knitting (and life) is for all kinds of different things, and there’s only what’s right for you, right now. It can be for soothing or for learning, for stretching or for comforting yourself. It can be for finishing, for putting things on pause, or sometimes even for ripping them out.

The new version of this very pretty sweater, named Blossom.

Would you like to test/sample knit this sweater?

I am looking for an intermediate-level knitter with the following qualifications:

• Experienced sweater knitter with a bust/chest size of 56 to 66 inches

• Someone who is familiar with their body measurements and making pattern modifications based on those measurements

• Someone who has verifiable experience knitting consistent gauge (e.g., Ravelry or Instagram photos, but doesn’t have to be a public profile)

• Is available to knit a project of ~1500 yards of worsted weight yarn on this schedule: yarn received by May 1, project finished by July 15 (10 weeks)

• Is familiar with knitting patterns and sweater fit and will communicate progress and pain points in the knitting/pattern reading process

This is a compensated position. Yarn is provided for the sample knit. You will have a choice of 9 colors. Payment is an equal yardage of my hand-dyed yarn in the base and colorway of your choice, and you can keep the sweater (if you like it, and after sending it to me for use at a sample event). If the sweater or its pattern-dictated fit is not to your preference, you can choose to give the sweater to me and receive an additional equal yardage amount. (So, 2x yarn usage is the payment.)

If this sounds like a good fit for you, please message me! 👇🏻

A word on compensation and where I hope to go: I have lots of feelings about test knits and have decided that expansive test knits are not for me. In the end, for me, test knitting is labor that contributes to the success of my business. I believe it should be compensated. I hope to design many garments in future, and I’ve decided to move toward a model where I work one-on-one with test/sample knitters of different sizes and compensate them—currently in yarn but eventually, in dollars. I’m still working out the economics for a model like this, but that’s where I hope to go.