knitWIP2014

“It’s humbling to start fresh. It takes a lot of courage. But it can be reinvigorating. You just have to put your ego on a shelf & tell it to be quiet.” ~ Jennifer Ritchie Payette

This project was simple enough. It was the one that made me get over my ~~fear~~ hatred of dpns — which is big cause I’ve declared ad nauseum on here how much I hate them — with absolutely no ladders!

I got to the point where I was a few stitches from finishing and that’s after I caught all of the dropped stitches then went merrily along without a complaint. But then I decided to try the hat on Ferdinand — y’all don’t laugh cause you know already that all my toys have names. 😀

It was kinda loose in the brim, and I thought it could do well with an image either done in intarsia or duplicate stitches. You know … to kind spruce it up a little. My friend Laurie didn’t care, she just wanted the hat, but I cared. It was fine the way it was, there were no mistakes showing, I could have given it to her. But I knew the project could have been better.

So I put my ego aside. I embraced all that it can be from starting over, then I frogged it.

It’s hard to start over. Sometimes in doing so, you have to either travel new, unknown roads or traverse again roads you’ve traveled before or experience a combination of both. But in my mind, knowing that you need to start over and making the attempt is courageous. It gives you, as one of my old professors used to say, “gristle for the mill”. This lesson can be applied to life, or a project. No matter which one, the object is the same — that starting over might take some effort, but it’s an opportunity to do better than you did the first time around. No matter how many times you have to start again.

So … my week started with my team getting trashed … boo hiss! Then I realised after the game, that the yoke of my Flax sweater looked small because … doh … I didn’t change to larger needles after doing the neck band!!! 😦 That means starting over and at this point, my timeline to finish it as an OWL for the HPKCHC competition is not going to be met. No worries though … although that baby’s on timeout, I’m even more determined to finish it. Then on top of all that, I go to work yesterday to hear that my job has lost all its major funding contracts, staff is going to have to be let go or mercifully, moved to other agencies. Adding to that stress, a position in my group (that has moved from 7 to 3 in the space of two and a half years) was slated to be on the chopping block.

I’m typically a positive person but yesterday’s work news took some of the wind out of my sails. Actually, it took a lot of wind out of my sails. Blessedly for me, my boss reconsidered how having two people instead of three in my department would affect operations negatively so for now we’re still three. But this sucks more than I could express and I’m so very tired of it. I wanted really to … errr … express myself in a not so nice way 😀 but I know that (1.) that’s not how I’m supposed to behave, (2.) it really wouldn’t change anything and (3.) that’s really not my style. So instead, in my lunch hour, I started this hat for one of my co-workers:

I’m not going to lie — it took a while for the meditative rhythm of knitting to get me to loosen my grip on the needles, to stop gritting my teeth, to lose the urge to cuss uncontrollably and to actually get back to the point of relaxing. Once I got myself together, I was able to pray, receive heavenly Help which allowed me to start breathing easier. When I looked down … the hat was almost at the point of decreases! LOLOL! Now that’s my kind of therapy!

There’s a lot to be done in the next two weeks and I’m going to have to push myself and my team hard to accomplish these goals. But in the mean time, while my Flax sweater is on time-out, I have to make some serious professional decisions while keeping calm and knitting. Even if it’s just a hat!