From Kris

Once fall comes, there is always that one person who first asks, “Have you started your Christmas shopping yet?”  And then around the first of December there is the one, an obvious overachiever, who asks, “Have you finished your Christmas shopping?”  We all know that these questions are asked by those who have crossed these respective tasks off of their to-do list.

When you make things for Christmas, “starting” your shopping is an ill-defined concept.  I have enough yarn in my stash to make gifts for everyone I know, and many people whom I don’t, for the next twenty years.  So I guess I am being honest when I answer the “have you started your Christmas shopping yet” question with a resounding Yes! regardless of when I am asked.  The better question is, “Have you started knitting for Christmas yet?”

Why are we so hung up on beginnings and endings anyway?

Maybe because they are seen as a measure of accomplishment.  Maybe because they are perceived to be black and white.  Most things have a clear starting point and an equally obvious ending point.  Or do they?

Lets talk about knitting.

A knitting project doesn’t really begin when you cast on those first stitches.  That may be when the fun starts, but it is not the actual beginning of the project.  Many yarns come in hanks that must first be wound into cakes or balls.  Then, one should make a gauge swatch.  Knitting a 4 inch square swatch tells you how many stitches and rows exist in an inch. This information lets you know whether or not the dimensions of your final piece will be accurate.  More importantly, it also determines the amount of yarn needed to finish the project.   Though many knitters don’t begin projects by knitting a gauge swatch, they should.  This is an important beginning step to every project.

One of my favorite books is the 1997 Newberry Medal winner A View from Saturday by E. L Konigsburg.  In it, a young boy is being taught how to do calligraphy by a woman who is a peer of his grandparents.  The first thing she had the boy do was go through a six-step process to filling his pen with ink.  The boy told the woman that six steps seems a lot to do before you begin.  She replied, “You must think of these six steps not as preparation for the beginning but as the beginning itself.”  This sentence has stuck with me for almost twenty-five years.  It surfaces every time I want to skip important preparatory steps and start something in the wrong place.  This sentiment is just one of many meaningful nuggets in this book.  I recommend it to everyone!  Despite being written as a young adult book, A View from Saturday has something to say to every generation.  If you take my word for this and read A View from Saturday, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Back to knitting…

As with the fountain pen, knitting begins with the preparation of materials, those behind the scenes first steps that are most important.  The actual knitting is the easy part.  But, when the last stitch of a piece is cast off, you have not come to the end.  As with the preparation, there are equally important steps to finishing.  Loose ends must be hidden and the final knitting must be blocked, meaning it must be wetted, shaped, pinned to the proper measurements, and let dry before it is finished.  Skipping any of these steps, beginning, middle, or end, will yield less than satisfactory results.  The complete process is necessary

I look at the beginnings and endings of years in much the same way that I look at them in my knitting.

My girls’ birthdays are December 22nd and 23rd. Mine birthday is the 28th.  As most people are seeing those last days of December as an ending of the year, we are also looking at them as the beginning of another.  Throw in the midst of that Christmas.  Balloons and trees, ups and downs, cake and eggnog, “Happy Birthday” and “Deck the Halls,” preparation and finishing, beginnings and endings all get jumbled up into one big chaotic ball.  It often takes me a week into the new calendar year to sort it all out in my heart and head so that I can move through the real steps to starting a new year and putting the final touches on the previous one.

This birthday and Christmas season was further confused by the fact that because of COVID, we did not celebrate my daughters’ birthdays on their actual birth dates.  Nor did we have our family Christmas on Christmas Day.  The preparation, the beginning, for birthdays and Christmas was relatively normal, but the finishing, the endings were not.  Though we eventually “did all the stuff,” none of it was on the “right” day.  Somehow I felt like I cheated on the last steps, that I didn’t properly finish and end the holidays.

Perhaps I just learned a new finishing technique and just need more practice to hone my skills.

As the new year begins, I am going to give myself the gift of careful preparation, the care and intentional thought that a true beginning needs and deserves.

I wish all of you happy and intentional beginnings to this new year!

from Tracey

Kris and I have talked a few times how the knitting process of beginnings and endings, and the feelings that go with them, can fit into so many other things, and be totally relevant. I know for me that I’m always excited to start a new knitting project, but as I get near the end, when I want to be done and using it, there’s more to do to get to that end-point. I guess that means I can’t have a “beginning” with it until I properly “end” it! And those steps to finish it are usually tedious, but as Kris said – very necessary.

The holidays have been all upside down now for a couple years, thanks to Covid, so as far as year-end activities go, it’s really messed up my usual routine, and yep, it’s made things feel “off” to a certain extent. The usual way we’ve always done things have shifted to adapt. Not that adaptation is a bad thing, but when you have a set way for so many years on the ending of one year and beginning of the next, it’s a strange feeling. Not to mention that now that Harry’s aware that “Santa” was in fact mom and dad, which opened up a tradition I’d had with my mom and that she’d had with her parents – opening gifts on Christmas Eve. So, we threw that in this year and while it was different for us, it wasn’t different for me and felt really normal in a time that is anything but normal!!

The discussion of beginnings and endings, and all the feels that go with them has been an ongoing conversation we’ve had before. This time it started with me seeking help in the knitting arena regarding the swatch I was working on for a sweater I’m making for myself. I must have made 3 different swatches, and for the life of me I couldn’t match the designers gauge, I had too many stitches per inch. The material produced with the recommended needles was so stiff it could’ve stood up on its own, the trend I was seeing that was to get the proper gauge so that it would actually FIT when I was done was going to be on huge needles that would have made a really sloppy fabric with too-big holes from too-large stitches, lol. Thankfully my Knitting Ninja Mentor, Kris – helped me out of this jam by suggesting changing sizes of the sweater, instead of the large, make the medium etc.

That conversation started us talking about how it’s something we really don’t like to do, at all, but it’s necessary. Super necessary – especially if you want all of your hard work to not be in vain. If you don’t swatch, you run a very real risk that your hours of hard work will translate into an item that won’t fit properly, and that’s a HUGE disappointment. But there are a lot of things that if you don’t properly prepare for you can be disappointed as well, or at least you end up stuck with a whole lot of extra work that could have been saved if you’d just taken a bit of your time in the beginning.

I think I’ve learned the hard way that sometimes shortcuts are the way to go, to save time with a particular step that really won’t matter at the end, because they won’t negatively affect the outcome. But, that said, some situations call for doing ALL the steps in the right order, as much as you might want to skip a tedious step, it will make you much happier with your end result in whatever you’ve chosen to do.

If I’d not taken the proper beginning step to swatch my sweater project, I couldn’t have adapted it to make it work – only adaptation would have been ripping it apart and starting over, which in the end would have been not only disappointing, but, would have produced a whole lot of extra work!

So, as much as missing some important year-end traditions, and even some of them out of order and done differently, it only affects how the transition to the new year feels, it didn’t actually affect the outcome in a negative way. It was one of those instances that while it made me feel weird and anxious, I found that rearranging steps or missing a few weren’t too bad. We adapted and made it work!

That may be my theme as well this year – giving myself the gift of careful preparation when needed, taking the time do it right and recognizing the instances when I can skip a step or two to save a little time. Here’s to setting ourselves up for success in those things we chose to do by taking the time needed to so the things right!