The One Thing I’ve Learned About Knitting
A knitting pattern is a beautiful promise. With just the right tools and materials, it says, you can make exactly what I have made. The pictures, at just the right light and angles, promise perfection.
The problem, of course, is any deviation from the instructions, materials, and tools will yield a distinctly different product, a potentially very imperfect product.
As a beginner knitter who was sourcing yarn from the thrift store while slowly building up a supply of needle types and sizes, it quickly became a challenge to consider how the materials I could access would work with the patterns I found online and in books.
I’ve learned that some yarns want to be. Some lovely Álafloss I got from an estate sale just didn’t want to be a blanket, no matter how I tried. Though it was the right weight for the pattern, the swatches didn’t feel right. The same pattern with 220 Superwash Merino and some Icelandic Spunni knitted up like butter, despite those yarns being a lighter weight than the pattern called for.
The problem is that patterns promise complete replication when exact circumstances are adhered to. Anything can be replicated with the right materials, tools, and instructions.
But life doesn’t work that way.
Even if I did buy the (expensive) exact yarn, in the exact colors, with the same (expensive) brand needles, and followed the pattern to create the exact same piece, it would still be different.
No matter what I’m working with, I’m a different person, my environment is different, my tension on the yarn varies, and my ability to count stitches correctly is questionable. The intent I put into the piece will contribute to a unique outcome almost too mysterious and magical to predict.
I could invest far more money and time into my knitting in order to replicate the patterns, but I can’t say it would increase my satisfaction or joy in the craft.
I could also frustrate myself to no end in an attempt to create perfect replications of patterns.
Instead, I pull a little from one pattern, try out different combinations, try to get familiar with types and weights of yarn. Though patterns are integral for inspiration and learning new skills, intuition is the guiding star and freeform experimentation is the joy in the journey.
There’s an infinite amount of combinations in knitting and some will work for me and some won’t.
Buying the exact yarn, in the exact colors, with the exact size needles, might yield a good copy, but that’s all it can ever be – a good copy. My fingers, my process, my environment can’t recreate the original.
So why would I want it to?
Embracing my unique circumstances and working with what I’ve got lets the patterns and pictures be inspirational, no more, no less.
I used to be frustrated when I attempted to craft. What I made was never like the picture. Now I see this as the perfect measure of creation. My mistakes, my process, my work, my own relationship with the materials.
This is all to say, an emphasis on replication (one might even say uncritical, thoughtless, exacting replication) is founded on a misunderstanding. Replication is fundamentally impossible.
At church, we are encouraged to replicate Joseph’s Smith’s life changing prayer, Moroni’s call to pray over the Book of Mormon, and now there’s a two year checklist full of action items for new converts.
The covenant path, as we know it now, continues to turn spirituality into replication. Everyone should get baptized. Everyone should enter the temple. Everyone should wear those garments 24/7. The covenant path turns the journey of conversion into a checklist. The garments wearing pendulum has swung back to prescriptive practices.
As church patterns correlate in ever tightening circles (the center cannot hold), replication becomes more urgent and more pressurized.
If we just do the exact thing in the exact way with exactness, the outcome will always be the same, our church patterns promise.
In knitting and at church, the one thing I’ve learned is that replication isn’t realistic.
