Sometimes I really surprise myself when I think about the fact that I am a knitter. Because, you see, I am not a patient person, at all. Sitting for long periods of time, working on one thing, for months until it is finished, is definitely not my normal thing.
I used to pick up a book and if it didn't grab me by the very first page, if not the first paragraph, I'd put it down and call it boring. I managed to still read a lot despite my rigorous (ahem) standards. Now I am a little more generous before deciding not to read something, but patient, no that really doesn't describe me.
Cate and Grace have been cross stitching quite a bit lately. Cate is completing this sampler by Alicia Paulson. She has already made this one, and loved every stitch of it. Grace is making this right now. I have two Anglophiles for daughters, and couldn't be more pleased about it. Princess Charlotte Elizabeth Diana...sigh. We were a little embarrassingly excited about her birth, I admit it here. I even posted about the new princess on Facebook.
But about the cross stitching- that's something I never really enjoyed. I didn't have the patience to sit there and sort out the colors, try to figure out which direction the x's should go in, look for my needle, again, start and end each color perfectly so the back looked almost as good as the front, and have the stamina to make it to the very end. However, cross stitching is a craft Cate and Grace both love to do, as different as their two personalities and tastes in other areas are. I say, great, now I will have some beautiful art on my walls I would otherwise not have.
I'm surprised, due to my impatient nature, that knitting thousands of little stitches, and putting hours upon hours into one little project, that grows at a snail's pace, appeals to me at all. When I first learned to knit, I hated it. I think the gross acrylic yarn was a huge part of that. But about twelve or thirteen years ago, an issue of Martha Stewart Living came out that featured a knitting section, showing beautiful warm cozy scarves knit out of the most beautiful wool- I wanted to reach through the magazine pages and touch it. I don't think I even really knew what wool was, at least in the crafting and textile sense. Of course I knew that it came from sheep. And I knew wool was scratchy. I was very well versed in this since I was very young, because whenever I would reach for a sweater or dress or scarf in the store, Mom would read the label:
"This has wool in it, Jenny. Wool is itchy." Back would go the item.
However, on the magazine pages, these wool scarves looked so soft and wonderful and I wondered what it would feel like to knit with yarn that didn't make me cringe when I squeezed it in the skein.
Shortly thereafter I went into a yarn shop, not Michael's, not Hobby Lobby, not Joann's, but an actual yarn shop. One that I had known of all my life, but never paid a second glance until now.
It took a couple of false starts and a couple of items that pretty much went straight to the trash can, before I finally made something awesome: fair isle hats made of Lamb's Pride bulky for Cate and Grace. Scratchy? Yes, I think Lamb's Pride is one of the scratchiest yarns out there, and I haven't knit with it since, but the colors were glorious, and the bouncy wool was like nothing else I'd ever knit with.
It didn't take me long to want to try some much more complex designs, using smaller and smaller needles. Suddenly I wanted to knit sweaters, fingering-weight ones at that. It was a challenge. Did I have the endurance to knit with size one needles, and entire adult sweater? Yes, I did, one tiny stitch at a time, and the tiny stitches added up to one inch after another until one day I'd pick up the knitting and the sweater that seemed impossible to make was almost done. An exercise in patience and persistence.
Maybe that's the way Cate and Grace love their stitching: working on a project that is tiny, minute, and tedious, and transforming it into beautiful art. In the same way they sit at the piano each day, little by little whittling away at a piece, or perhaps polishing is a better word, and from one day to the next it moves forward in the tiniest degree.
The discouragement and frustration at recognizing how much work would need to go into a piano piece before it was "finished" is what sealed my pianistic doom. Once I could play the notes I really had no patience for spending more time on the pice and I wanted to move on to something else. Fingering? Technique? Dynamics? Pedaling? and another six months after all those are learned and memorized before it finally begins to sound professional? Too hard, too boring, and so I gave up without really trying.
It's funny how beauty is often synonymous with time. A garden with hours of work put into it. A loaf of bread with a long, slow rise so flavors and textures are fully developed. A ridiculously complex fair isle sweater; a piano sonata; an Olympic figure skating performance; an enormous lego structure; a perfectly organized house; all these things are admirable and the comment inevitably is, "Wow, that must have taken an incredible amount of work to learn/build/train/do."
I guess I'm discovering there really are no shortcuts to glory. Yes, cutting corners is possible, but the price is often paid in some way that leads to disappointment with the finished project. But putting the work into it will pay off as long as you don't give up before the job is done. It's a lesson I'm maybe starting to learn. I think my kids are learning it too.
