M'aidez

I'm terrible at making decisions. Something about the finality of making a decision and being stuck with it whether it turns out good or bad. Even if it's just dinner or what movie to watch or even what shoes to wear. Okay I'm actually really good at picking out clothes and I only really wear like two pairs of shoes that are really weather dependent so that's helpful. But dinner, that part is true. If I'm asked what I want to eat or where I want to go out to eat I freeze and my mind goes blank. Why should I have to make such an important decision? I usually voice my objection to being made to decide where we should go to eat and that's when everyone reminds me that I have dietary restrictions so I have to be the one to decide.

But when I finally make a decision, I stick to it. There have to be a lot of extenuating circumstances for me to change my mind.

I picked a major and stuck with it until I realized that I really didn't like working for 14 hours at a time, 7 days a week and not getting paid for it just as an attempt to possibly get a job in an incredibly competitive field. And I didn't change it immediately. It took probably a year for me to realize that I wasn't happy and that I wouldn't be happy with my decision. That's when I changed majors and I didn't even really change majors, I just changed my concentration. And now I'm working on a completely different career path than I had planned six years ago. We can discuss how terrifying that is at a later date.

Knitting projects are something that I also take very seriously. If a project isn't going how I want, it will fall to the bottom of the WIP pile and stay there, wallowing in my rejection and failure. I have countless things that I just haven't ripped and frogged it back into that original ball of string. I just can't take the eventual step of taking hours of work and making it seem like it never happened, like hitting the delete key and getting rid of a whole page of writing.

Not the actual color

I recently did this though. I bought this yarn so that I could make a sweater. It isn't especially nice yarn but I wanted a sweater with this fantastic color that cameras can't seem to capture. This is my third attempt at making a sweater with this yarn. [Third time's a charm?] The first time was too big and would never fit me even if I had tried to fit two of my closest friends in with me. The second time I decided I wanted to make something complicated. Something to challenge myself. Something that wasn't mindless. The problem wasn't that the pattern was too hard or that it was the wrong size, the problem was that I can't count. [Half of my problems in life go back to this basic skill that even toddlers seem to master.] My lace motifs were off and I had dropped a stitch several rows back in a complicated lace pattern. And my biggest fear: What if the back and the two front panels turn out to be different sizes?

And then I let it sit. It sat only for a few months in the purple project bag, reminding me every time I went to look at my closet. It was waiting for me to decide what to do with this half attempt at a sweater. Do I start over? Do I try to finish it? Do I continue to ignore it in hopes that it will magically finish itself?

I kept choosing the latter.

It didn't finish itself.

There is a phenomenon that knitters and crocheters and I'm sure other crafters experience when you find a pattern and you have a yarn and the two seem to speak to each other and decide that they're going to work together. The yarn chooses the pattern that it wants to be made in to. It seems silly and a bit ridiculous but it happens. I knew that my purple yarn didn't want to be made into that first sweater. I thought it wanted to be made into that second sweater.

But third time's a charm.

I've made more of this sweater than any of the others and everything seems to just work. Sure, I messed up one of the cable patterns but not in a really noticeable way. It doesn't even really bother me knowing that I messed them up.

Sure, I might change my mind and those few mistakes might be enough for me to rip the whole thing out in the future but for right now, everything just seems to be working together.

I think crafting is the closest thing to magic that I will experience. I am taking plain string and some aluminum sticks and creating something that is not only useful but beautiful. Not many hobbies can do that.

Knitters are wizards.