Unknitting

Wrote this just over a year ago when I meant to start this blog. Just getting to it. There are not enough hours in the day.
Knittngblog- Unknitting for a New Year, Jan 1, 2008

New Year’s day- Cold rain mixed with fat snowflakes and then a grey mist; a perfect day to stay in and start a project. I have been unknitting a sweater which has been lying fallow in my yarn stash box. Yesterday while looking for a pattern for a friend I came across a pattern from Maine sweaters which I have long thought I should do and a light bulb went off. The main color of this multi color cardigan is roughly the same as the sweater that has been waiting in the yarn box for its rebirth.
The trouble with the sweater is that when I knit it 15 years ago I hadn’t yet figured out that my torso is disproportionately long so although I wore it for a few years I spend the whole time pulling it down trying unsuccessfully to lengthen it. At one time I even started reworking it because the irony is that I had two extra skeins of the wool for this sweater. But I had knit it the traditional way by which I mean from the bottom up and so taking out the ribbing way not only tedious but also not really the solution because even if I had picked up the stitches and added to the sweater the stitches would be in the wrong direction and it would have been obvious.
So here I am about ten years later on New Year’s Day. I started unraveling the sweater thanking the knitting goddesses that I had knit it in the round so I only had the sleeve seams to pick apart and then she unraveled sweetly. I finished the unknitting on New Year’s Day. My friend Julia told me that whatever you do on New Year’s Day you will be doing all year long. This seems perfectly in tune with my life: recycling old yarn into something new and wonderful. I recycle everything so why not one of my favorite mediums.
This yarn that I have labored over began its life on Prince Edward Island. We traveled there about 16 years ago. I sent my husband and sons off to the potato museum and found a yarn shop. The yarn is the color of the sky on a light filled summer day. It had flecked of straw in it. Every time I look at it I can see those wonderful rolling hills in PEI with those huge golden hayricks. So I am sitting by the fire on a chilly New Year’s Day in New York remembering a buttery sweet summer day in a far off country and dreaming of a sweater from the coast of Maine. That’s a lot of miles traveling in my chair by the fire. Good way to begin a year.