From day one of my knitting career, though perhaps calling it a vocation is more correct, my goal has been sweaters. I love sweaters. I think I always have. In the early days of my knitting, I couldn't imagine wearing a pullover sweater. That style has always had to be too big on top in order to fit my hips.
Yes, even as a young woman, I had these hips and the short span from small waist to what in heavens name hips. The ratio really hasn't changed, only the general overall size. I never so much as looked at pullovers and so, I became a cardigan sort of person.
All my early sweater knits were cardigans. Everything was meant to be worn with a collared garment underneath or at the very least a t shirt. It is just the way I had been for so long that it was part of how I went forward into clothing myself everyday. Now that I know how to knit my sweaters to fit, and particularly since I am not working anymore, I am trying to change my thinking and to become a pullover person.
It's harder than you would think. Take this sweater,
my take on the Laekur sweater from Knitty.com. I love this thing. I never did get around to putting buttons on it, because I always had on a something underneath and the low cut placket didn't matter. But since I started wearing the turtleneck and the grey green sweater, I started looking at other things I have knit and could I and should I wear them without something else under them.
Yesterday, I pulled Laekur on first thing in the morning because my usual garb, the Easy Bulky One
Photo so you know which one I am talking about
is in need of a wash. When I grabbed it, I just pulled it on over my pjs. I've never worn it without something substantial under it before and it is really comfortable and snuggly. I knit this cardigan to be a pullover because I always keep my sweaters closed anyway, but I never left the idea of wearing a shirt under it behind.
I will never think of it that way again.
Wearing it sans other shirt does mean I had to actually finish it with buttons bought so long ago during the giant button thing of 2018. As a wear alone garment, as cold as it has been this past week, the open placket was just wrong.
My job, first thing this morning, was to find buttons and to sew them on.
Mission accomplished. It is perfect and completely right for wearing as is. Even though I was actively trying to change the kinds of sweaters I would consider knitting, I was stuck at the old way of thinking about what I already had knit.
It's funny how difficult it is to change your idea of what things are, how things should be done, what stuff means in our small individual worlds. Our brains get stuck on a way of being and thinking and it can be beastly hard to change. Not just about sweaters, but about everything. This sweater story is a kind of parable of how our brains hold fast to the path it knows and to our fundamental expectations of where we are in time and space. With everything that has been talked about in the fibre world this past couple months, with everything that goes on politically and socially the last few years, it is something we need to understand about our human condition. Long held beliefs and ideas about the way things are, are devilishly hard to get out of our heads when they need to change.
The first step is to recognize the rut our minds have kept us in, in the little ways and in the big. The next step is to keep searching, to be actively aware of the subtle ways we hold to old, and to always stay open to change.
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