Crafting no. 6: cozy sweaters, Emerson, & the comfort of next steps

Hi, again!

I recently experienced a loss that made it difficult to write. Writer’s block is common enough and doesn’t require justification, but this particular block had a clear provenance. I have always been a listener first and then a speaker, but only when I have something to say. I wasn’t going to blow up your inbox with half-assed writing when I wasn’t feeling it! Instead I have been knitting, a lot, to keep myself busy.

In my life I have felt that there are two different kinds of creativity: a pure generative type and a formulaic type. The most salient example of this in my life is the difference in creative between my sister and I. She is an artist and can come up with paintings, Inktober drawings, and print blocks purely from her own brain. I can draw to get my point across, I always say, but I am much more creative in a formulaic sense — I am good at following a pattern that is laid out before me. My sister says she could never follow complex knitting or sewing patterns in the way I do. I tried to teach her crochet once and she gave up almost immediately. At times I have felt that this sort of pattern-following creativity is less-than, not TRUE creativity in the sense of generating something out of nothing, in the way she does. Filling in a coloring page < making an oil painting, if that makes sense. This is, of course, a pointless way to think.

On the flipside, there is the Emerson argument, from his essay on Shakespeare, that true generative originality is impossible:

Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving, like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay, and making bricks, and building the house; no great men are original. Nor does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other men.

A great man does not wake up on some fine morning, and say, ‘I am full of life, I will go to sea, and find an Antarctic continent: to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany, and find a new food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I foresee a new mechanic power:’ no, but he finds himself in the river of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his contemporaries.

The mid-progress selfie

I spoke in my early Substack days (earlier this year) about my foray into more complicated knitting projects. Making a sweater seemed like an impossibly complex task until I realized my fear of being inadequate was not a good enough reason not to try something I wanted to try. I have been addicted to knitting sweaters. Like many other things in life, I learned that knitting a sweater is a matter of eating an elephant one bite at a time, and not at all an impossible task. I’ve done a lot of unraveling, to be sure, but knitting a sweater, like anything else, comes down to a series of individual steps. Sometimes you have to learn a new decrease, a new decorative stitch, but you figure it out. Knitting patterns can be so elegant in a way that is not tangible until the object is forming in your hands: intricate designs, delicately sloping shoulders. People talk abstractly about how satisfying it must be to make your own clothes, but the satisfaction of making clothes that fit well, stitch by stitch, is even better.

All the satisfying textures and shapes of mid-progress sweaters

Knitting has a meditative quality that makes it more spiritually important in my life than I would have thought, hence my addiction to it. I thought that I could never be motivated to finish a sweater if it didn’t have some sort of pattern going on to keep me engaged. I told myself I’d never have the attention to finish something that took so long. A few months in, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. I’ve been gravitating towards patterns that are mostly stockinette stitch (i.e., no pattern) because I found that peak engagement at all times during a six-week knitting project is not as important or even as desirable as I thought. Much of the time, I want to turn my brain off, listen to an audiobook, and allow my hands and mind to be occupied at a lower level of stimulus than is normal during our modern days. It’s a nice break from thinking about your to-do list, or in my case, grief. It’s comforting, too, to have someone else to write out the next step, and to follow it. The result is still a self-esteem boost, something to be proud of, a necessary reinforcement of your belief in your own perseverance and ability.

If you want to get into knitting sweaters, my main recommendation is 1) to invest in a set of interchangeable needles (I have this one) and 2) don’t skimp on yarn. It can be expensive, but if you buy a crappy yarn, in all likelihood you won’t be as happy with the end product. You will spend more time wearing the sweater than you will knitting it (even if it doesn’t feel like that while you’re working on it), and so it’s important to be satisfied with the texture and feel of what you’re making. It makes for an overall more pleasant experience knitting, too — the natural oils in yarns made from animal fibers allow them to glide more easily over the needles, which is more ergonomic and less frustrating (read: more meditative) for you.