Love Is All You Knit

Well hug your hanks and snuggle your skeins because I have a surprise finished knit to show you!  May I present The Fiver:

When it comes to a sweater that was five years in the making, all I can say is that this baby has some stories.  I cast on back in March of 2007,  thinking it seemed like a million stitches since it was also my first time working a big project with fingering weight yarn.  I knitted slowly through the bottom portion of the sweater over the next few months, but eventually got bored with it and put it aside for newer, easier-to-finish projects.  When we moved to NYC that next summer, it was boxed up with my yarn and made the journey with us.

I pulled it out of that box just after Christmas 2008, at a time when all I wanted to do was knit on something, but I couldn’t afford to buy yarn for new projects.  It was our first winter in New York, and it was a cold one.  I remember sitting next to a space heater with Henry, knitting away at the sleeves, wondering if I would ever finish it.

I did finish the sleeves that winter, but I was never happy with my attempts at seaming and kept ripping it out.  The sweater and sleeves went back into a box and were ignored for many more months.  Again, they were boxed up with my yarn and made the journey with us back to Texas last fall.

I was chatting with a fellow knitter one day at work and happened to mention this project that  I was always agonizing over in the back of my mind, that sweater that was completely finished except for a few buttons and some shoulder seaming and she just looked at me and said “I’ll seam it for you.”  And sure enough, she did.  And just like that, this sweater that I had put so many stitches, so many hours of my life into was finished.

I used to be more of a product knitter than a process knitter, but it seems the tides are turning.  I really like the idea of looking at a knitted piece that took a long time to complete and remembering all the moments of my life that have been knitted into every stitch.