Unmaking

It is easy to think of knitting as a craft of making, of generating a new thing where there was nothing before, creating soft order and careful structure out of the chaos of a skein. These days I am finding myself drawn increasingly back toward the source of all that making. I have been picking up my drop spindle for the first time in years to feel the tender strength of light and airy wool twisting into tight yarn. I idly browse the internet for dyeing kits in my spare time and contemplate the risk they may pose to my stove and my cookware. How long will it be before I am keeping sheep, the ultimate source of wool, in the parking lot behind my apartment?

The process of creation taking place in the craft of knitting is far from effortless. When you hold a fresh skein in your hands and prepare to wind it into a ball, anything is possible. But as soon as you cut the ties and slip the long skein around the back of a chair as a makeshift swift, beginning to wind and wind, you start to see the imperfections. Maybe the skein hasn’t been tied properly, so tangles assert themselves. Maybe the dyeing is inconsistent. Maybe your hand-wound ball is shaped more like a lumpy potato than a round grapefruit. And then you start knitting. Mistakes creep into your stitching. You lose patience with your progress. You start adapting the pattern on the fly.

And sometimes… well, sometimes you make it nearly all the way through a project, feeling so proud of yourself, and then you discover that it is all wrong.

Three years ago I bought six hundred yards of beautiful goldenrod-colored wool. I planned to make a fall jacket with it. I treasured the potential in this beautiful yarn and admired the way it looked in the sun. Then I knitted the back panel and one of the side panels of the jacket, plowing eagerly ahead. I was almost ready to begin the second panel when I discovered two things: first, my estimation of the correct size was off, and second, I had completely misinterpreted the pattern for the side panel. All that work: useless.

I stuffed the jacket pieces in a bag and buried them under the rest of my yarn stash. There they sat, surfacing occasionally as I moved to a new apartment, dug through yarn to find needles, and transferred my stash to a shelf. I felt guilty every time I saw them: guilty for failing my beautiful yarn, ashamed that I had given up, embarrassed that I had made such large errors in the first place.

There’s nothing quite like the frustration and shame you feel when your beautiful (and expensive) yarn turns out to have become the most useless thing you could have made – and after hours of hand-aching work, no less. You will be reminded of your own mistakes. The failed garment will haunt you like a ghost in the back of your closet. Three days ago I decided I had had enough of this. I recently accepted that my body simply isn’t the same after a few years of graduate school and various health issues as it was three years ago. This made it easier to pull out the sweater again, to face facts.

But I did not take it out to finish it. I took it out to unravel it. After all, I had only purchased enough yarn to make a size small.

 

As embarrassing it is to screw up a garment, it is an implicit violation of knitting ethics to discard it. Rather than waste hundreds of yards of perfectly good yarn that did nothing wrong, most knitters will opt to rip out their poorly crafted work. Many knitters call this “frogging,” from “rip it, rip it,” an analogue to “ribbit.” Three days ago I started frogging that ill-fated fall jacket, and then I started making a scarf patterned with stitched stars from the fresh remnants.

There are many lessons in yarn, but this is one of the most difficult: that sometimes the penultimate stage of creation is the unmaking of your own labor. The process of unmaking proceeds with a bittersweet kind of love, and with more than a little wonder and grief at how easily and quickly the stitches unravel.

But unmaking lays the groundwork for the beautiful work to come. When the whole arc of the creative process can be seen in full, meaningful creation is impossible without unmaking. It is humbling to recognize that the time has come to unmake one’s own work, but it is a joy to use the resultant yarn – crimped though it may be from languishing in a flawed garment – in a new form. Unmaking reclaims the liberty and potential of a brand-new skein.

I have more confidence in this star-patterned scarf than I ever had in the fall jacket, which now exists only in a few plump balls of yarn. It grows inch after inch from my needles, flourishing thanks to every stitch unmade.