Picking My Battles…

I’m pretty sure my yoga practice has helped me better “pick my battles.” Admittedly, I can be pretty stubborn. A bit of a perfectionist even. While at times those traits can come in handy, they have also caused a few growing pains over the years…at home, professionally, even in my crafting world.

My Mom is a lovely quilter. Last spring when we were visiting her over my daughter’s school break she was showing me her latest quilting adventures. I love quilts. I love the tradition of what quilting represents. I love that in my family of crafters, quilting is one constant that spans several generations. I love how, much like knitting, quilting has found a fresh face with amazing contemporary fabrics and designs that reflect our ever changing world. I’m constantly amazed by my Mom’s (mostly self taught) free motion quilting skills. While I was oohing and aahing, my Mom was pointing out the little mistakes she needed to work on fixing. Mistakes I would have never noticed had she not pointed them out. (And some I still really didn’t see after she did!) The whole exchange prompted a discussion about how our need for perfection can at times stifle our imagination. I know personally my craft frustrations usually come in one of two ways:

• Having an idea for a crafty project but not necessarily possessing the foundational skills needed to create something that resembles my vision.

-OR-

• Being so hung up on making sure I’m using good technique that I loose sight of the creative side of the project.

I think in many ways yoga has helped me let go just enough to both trust that I can tackle a project with creative solutions if my skills are lacking and accept that sometimes a little imperfection is perfectly OK. That’s it’s often about the process of exploration as much as the final outcome. That sometimes “mistakes” lead you in a new direction that outshines your previous ideas. And sometimes things simply just don’t work/look like crap/don’t fit/have to be frogged or scrapped and that’s OK too because at least you gave it a shot, hopefully learning a little along the way to give the next project a better shot at success.

This more relaxed approach has come in very handy in my knitting. I was thinking about it this weekend as I worked on MY hand-warmers which are currently on my needles. (Though not for long as I hope to finish up mitt #2 tonight! SO excited to start using them with this unexpected early arrival of winter!) I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been happily knitting along only to discover several rows back there exists a random purl stitch where a knit stitch should be. At first I would agonize over whether it was worth ripping out several rounds to go back and fix it or if I should just let it be. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that there are times when un-knitting and fixing is necessary. (Like the pair of hand-warmers I made last spring that I didn’t really notice until I had bound them both off that they had a significant difference in the number of rows in the palm section. Or the pair of warmers I completed earlier this month that just didn’t look quite right to me after I finished them off. So I went back and redesigned the finished edge more to my liking. But I digress…) But I’ve decided 1 random purl stitch (as long as it doesn’t affect the integrity of the item) isn’t one of them. In fact I have come to loving think of them as my little hidden purls.

Just a little treasure that says, “Hi! I’m hand made and sometimes mistakes happen.”

So far I’ve kept those hidden purls to one a pair. (And sometimes I can get through a whole project without a hidden purl presenting itself. Woo hoo!) With socks next on the list of “knitted items I want to learn how to make”, who knows what could happen. Let’s hope I don’t find myself with a whole farm of misplaced purls. If so, I guess I’ll be working on my “rip it out, re-roll the ball, and start again” meditation mantra.

~namaste~