I had every intention of writing a post before this, every intention of writing about my birthday, two weeks past now, about small and joyous celebrations with friends and family. I planned to write a thoughtful post about outdoor concerts and history, and even an Independence Day concert and how nice it was to sit on the lawn, watching a diverse community -- ethnically, politically, economically, socially -- gather together and listen to music that celebrates the brighter side of the American experience. In this age of pandemics and lockdowns and "me too" and "Black Lives Matter", all important, we also need to sometimes be reminded of the good things that tie us together, even when those good things are only music.
Of course there is no "only" to music. Music is basic to human experience. Just as, for all our failings, we should not belittle dreams and optimism and the hope of doing better, for these are also part of both human experience and the American experience. Our founding fathers, our ancestors wherever they were from, were not perfect people, nor are we. It is good sometimes to be reminded to celebrate the optimism of their hopes, of the historical optimism of our dreamers, even when we fail to live up to them. Because it is my hope that we can try and try again. It is easy to forget that despite all that is not right in the world, there is much that is better, and if we share our dreams, we can be better yet.
Geesh. I didn't think I had that in me.
My goal today is actually to catch up on some finished projects, more of a "See! Look what I've done" post than a meditative, thoughtful post. Although I can't claim that "doing" has actually been one of my goals of late, things still get done at their own slow meandering pace.
I started this cardigan in February, before my life got turned upside down, and I finished it in early July. I am happy with it, happy to have made it, happy at the prospect of wearing it even though at the moment, it is the last cardigan that will fit in my cardigan drawer. Of course I will knit more cardigans, and I will probably have to let go of something along the way. Life really is not about buying things, having things, even making things, although making, communing with both other humans and the world at large is an important part of creating a good life. Having more doesn't make us better people, or even happier people. And my compulsion to knit is more about the making than the having more aspect of stuff, and about the joy of wearing something I made.
My life, as small as it is at the moment, is actually fairly full, and fairly content, if not always pleasant, and I am suprisingly content to knit a little here and there, to take some string and turn it into something both useful and beautiful. I am blessed to not experience the need to rush, the need to butt my head against deadlines. What makes life good is not really about deadlines, about having or doing more. A good life is not even really about how far we can remove ourselves from pain and hardship and tragedy, because these are the reality of existence the everyday presence of the cycle of life. Living a good life is about how we choose to cope with the life we are dealt and for each of us the choices are different. There is always choice, even not making a choice is a choice. Every person's choices are unique to them, to their own hearts and experiences, they are not ours to judge. My choices, or at least my preferences, although I have occasionally bowed to outside pressure in terms of choices, more so when I was younger, revolve around books, the making and sharing of food, yarn and fiber. These are my happy places.
Two weeks ago I finished a sweater, the second of the two cardigans I had been working on. This one is in purple cashmere. Both the pattern, and the yarn are from L'Atelier in Redondo Beach, California. The pattern is called Back to the Future, the yarn, Classica DK, for those of you who care about those things. I had shown you snippets, bits and pieces of the project before, and I assembled it slightly differently than usual this time, knitting and blocking the body, assembling it, then knitting the sleeves, knitting them to fit, and setting them into the finished sweater after blocking.
Of course, my summer shift does not coordinate very well with the sweater, but it is unlikely they will be worn together, at least in public. I have worn the sweater already. Cashmere has that wonderful quality of somehow adapting to body heat cycles, and there are days during my chemo where I am simply cold no matter what the ambient temperature, although mostly the opposite is true. I am not handling the heat of summer well. The garden suffers and knitting thrives. Curling up in a comfy spot, occasionally in a cashmere sweater accompanied by a soft and fluffy blanket, with a book or more yarn is the epitome of cozy comforting self-care.
The second project I am sharing with you today was born from the first. When I finished this cardigan I had two skeins of yarn left. I also had one skein of the same yarn in a green-teal, from a cashmere pullover I knit in 2018, as well as a bag of color samples of the same yarn (shown above). My initial plan had been to make a scarf using the green and the miscellaneous samples, and to turn the two skeins of purple into a hat. But it soon became obvious that although a scarf can be knit from less than 300 yards of DK weight yarn, I couldn't wrap my head around creating said scarf with the 10 colors I had in such a way as to produce a scarf I would actually wear.
Much knitting and ripping and reknitting ensued. Then, after a day of weighing and calculating, I came up with a plan for a simple garter stitch scarf that would use up most of the yarn and would create a scarf of the scale I prefer. The end result is balanced, but not quite symmetrical, which is fine with me as I have always been more interested in balance than in classic symmetry. And there are a few subtle variations mostly due to small variations in yardage. Although all the small samples are the same weight, they vary in yardage. This is not surprising. The white yarn, which is not weighted with dye, has the most yardage per gram, and the yardage varies with each color. I wonder if someone has done a study on this, on the weight of dye as it affects the yardage on skeins. Someone probably has, and I distinctly remember that there are certain yarns that contain significantly less yardage per gram in black than in other colors. Not that I am going to follow up on this; it is just idle speculation on my part.
Here is the scarf in its entirety. I am calling it by the not very creative name of "bits and bobs scarf". I used up all but a couple of inches here and there of the yarn samples, and all but about 6 inches of the green yarn. I was somewhat concerned that I would not have enough to finish the alternating striping at the end of the second end (following the gray) but I did. I also used 1 1/2 skeins of the purple cashmere, leaving half a skein. I can live with that.
I am very happy with the results and it will probably get lots of wear, or at least as much wear as I can manage, depending on the variability of Knoxville winters. I can wear the scarf with the cardigan on many Knoxville Winter days, but it will also look lovely with my muted-plum all-weather winter coat, so that is a distinct advantage.
It seems interesting to me that I have knitted two cardigans and two scarves lately, after not knitting winter things for a while, especially warm winter scarves. I am working on a third scarf now. They suit this time and place in my life. Just as part of living a full and relatively contented life though chemo means listening to my body and letting it claim all the rest it desires, so too the creative life revolves around listening to what my knitting muse desires, not in a mad rush to finish, but sometimes just letting the yarn run through my fingers, happily knitting a few rows, then contentedly caressing and admiring what my fingers have wrought.
