It FINALLY snowed! I was getting worried that vacation would end before there was another storm. Although I usually like my winter weather to come between the hours of 4am and 6am on a school day, I was getting desperate for a light, fluffy snow before heading back to class so I could snap some pictures of my latest knitting projects: neck warmers on fence posts and heavy aran sweaters on husbands leaning against old dodge trucks. I needed the snow cover to mask the depressing brown that pervades a Pennsylvanian winter, and I'm thankful Mother Nature provided just enough.
I must make two confessions: I'm absolutely obsessed with photographing my knitting projects, and I can't stop admiring the pics once they're posted on Ravelry, Facebook, and now this blog.
Last night, my husband, who was a wicked good sport when I dressed him up and dragged him around for a photo-shoot, told me I was incredibly vain. He just caught me looking at the pictures during the Eagles game for the up-tenth time. Although my gut reaction was to defend my honor, I decided he might be right and then...I embraced the accusation! The fence posts are far more flattering than the alternative: a selfie.
But I wonder...am I, or any knitter who has just finished a project, really peacocking? We knitters turn nothing into something after months, weeks, days, or maybe just hours. The sweater my husband is wearing above started out as 14 balls of brown yarn, two years ago when we wandered into Colorful Stitches, one of my favorite, local knit shops in Lenox, MA, not far from where I grew up. An hour later, we walked out with these 14 balls of British Sheep Breeds chunky yarn and a pattern book: Rowan's Purelife Winter Collection. For a year and a half, the yarn sat untouched, in its bag, while I worked on other projects, but this July, July 29th to be exact, I pulled it out and cast on while we were vacationing on Chebeague Island. A project such as Cartmel Mens is time consuming, and, when we came back from our summer holiday, I stole time in the car waiting for my husband to get a haircut, at school before the students arrived, Sunday mornings before the dog nudged me to go out for a walk and any other time I could manage. I got up early and stayed up late. I worked 20 rows, found a mistake and tore out 10 because I couldn't live with an imperfection no one else would notice.
This sweater is a thing of beauty: the color, the texture, the weight. I can't stop staring at it because I can't believe I created it. It came from sitting down for endless hours, reading a pattern in a "foreign" language, and rubbing two metal sticks on a wire together while making a whole bunch of knots in a strand of yarn. It came from nothing. It came from designer Marie Wallin. It came from me.
It's okay to be a peacock in a snow storm when you've created an object of form fitting beauty!
