‘Tis better to have knit and frogged

Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
(Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H., 27.13-17)

Far be it from me to break up the Woo-hoo-it’s-autumn festivities (I really do love this time of year), but I feel like there’s a jumper in the room we really need to discuss. And even though it may not have an elephant on it, I think you may know the one I’m talking about.

It’s the project you started last year or perhaps longer ago than that, which didn’t get finished and likely never will – the one which started with good intentions but then came to a halt. A misguided idea about colours that don’t really go together anymore, or it was meant for a small person who became bigger meanwhile, or it’s a shape that isn’t your thing now, or maybe the knitting started to get a bit boring, or worse than that – the pattern made no sense. It’s okay. It’s okay to change your mind, and for the reason to be neither practical nor easily explicable. Sometimes it’s just like that. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time…’ is good enough for me.

That’s not the part we have to speak about. What interests me, and in some kind of interlinked way, also the planet and the sheep and the wool makers, is what we do with the unfinished thing.

There’s yarn in that there project and if you bought it from Wild and Woolly, I’m going to take a punt and say it’s probably really nice yarn too. The promise of the project you first thought of may be over, but that doesn’t have to mean it’s all over. The feeling you had about starting to make something new – the thrill you felt when you cast on, the comfort zone you found when the stitches got going – the yarn is as good for that now as ever it was. It just needs to be the right project.

But the right one doesn’t stand a hope unless the wrong project lets it go. And in my experience that needs 2 things to happen – you need to let some time pass and then concede that it’s over.

As far as I know it took Tennyson a while to get to the point where he could write his famous lines about the love and loss he felt for his great friend. Yes, he felt dispair, but the real (and beautifully made point) is that it was all worth it. Regardless of the grief, it wasn’t a mistake to have loved in the first place. 

Now I’m not sure he would have been best pleased with me for appropriating his lines for knitting, but as he’s not reading this newsletter I’m doing it anyway, because I think it really applies. 

That it didn’t work out with that one doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world or your knitting – it’s just the end of that project. Luckily for you, there’s is quite literally, plenty more knitting where it came from.

..All of which is just a characteristically long-winded way for me to say that if you’re feeling a bit out-of-love with something that hasn’t gone anywhere in a while, please bring it in. We’ll help with the frogging. And yes you can look away while we do it if you prefer. We’ll rewind the wool for you and together we can see about finding the right project.