Link to Love: The Best-Ever Knitting Advice

For the past few weeks, the blogging world has been filled to the brim with posts about New Year's resolutions and goals for 2014. Personally, I really like reading all those posts. They tend to humanize the blog authors of the world, and I like thinking about how even the writers behind some of the biggest, coolest blogs on the internet are regular people just like me who have goals that are similar to my own.

This year, my absolute favorite post in the New Year's genre is "At the top of the year" by Glenna from Knitting to Stay Sane. Rather than listing specific resolutions for the coming year, she made an insightful list of knitting advice that will be just as relevant in June as it is in January.

Her words that resonated with me the most are "Recognize why you knit, and for whom. Allow yourself to stop knitting on projects that don't match those reasons."

Those words really got me thinking about my reasons for knitting, which I've never spent much time exploring before. Then today happened, and the answer became quite clear.

I often talk about how much I love skating in shows, but show life (like every kind of life) isn't always perfect. Being a principal pair skater is fun, but it also comes with a lot of pressure. In our solo in our current show, my partner and I do 11 difficult tricks in a very short period of time, and some of those tricks are high-risk release elements (a.k.a. things that might make me fall). In our second show today, I fell on our throw jump. The ice was quite choppy because it was almost the end of the show, so I stuck to the ice instead of sliding across it, which is as painful as it is embarrassing. The audience emitted a collective gasping noise. I was not pleased with myself.

When the show ended I went back to my cabin, applied several bandaids to my arm, then sat down with my knitting. As I knitted, I stopped beating myself up about my poor performance in the show; I pretty much stopped thinking about anything, and it felt really good. Suddenly I realized this is why I knit!

I knit to relieve stress. I knit because it's something constructive to think about. I knit because I genuinely enjoy pondering stitch counts and gauges and knitting-related math. I knit because it gives me a sense of accomplishment. I knit because I like knowing I'm making something completely unique. I knit because I like giving those unique objects to the people I love. I knit because it makes me happy, and I like sharing my happiness.

Why do you knit?
xoxo
Laura