Yesterday,
I was hunting through my yarn stash for my Claudia hand-painted linen (poppy
color – for a design project) and I ran across two projects I had set aside in
the fall when Christmas knitting became priority.  The King Tut Color Affection and the Leaves
of Grass Shawl!  I had totally forgotten
about them!  Kind of demoralizing. 

But the
truth is that I do have a small collection of hibernating projects – set aside
when something else became more pressing. 
Or the season changed.  Or…well,
for whatever reason.   And I do get back
to them — well, some of them.  To most
of them, eventually, I hope, though some will probably never be finished.  I plan to go through all my knitting stuff
this winter — sort and organize and put away and frog a few things, too. 

Anyhow, I
was feeling bad about those projects and all the yarn in the stash that has not
been knit up into anything yet….until I remembered what Stephanie
Pearl-McPhee (The YarnHarlot) said (at least I am pretty sure it was her…) :  No one criticized Picasso for having too much
paint.

And it
made me think.  Why can't we have the
same attitude toward knitting as we do to painting?  If you went into a painter's studio and saw
lots of paint and brushes, partially finished canvases, sketches and notes, and
maybe things were even a little messy — why, you wouldn't think anything of
it, right?  Looks like an active
workplace.  And if someone told you the
painter was going to spend all morning painting, well, what of it?  It is what painters do.  Even amateur painters. And if the painter
wasn't happy with how a painting was going and started over, maybe even several
times, you would probably admire his tenacity in the pursuit of excellence.  Actually, the more experimenting with colors
and developing of techniques you saw the artist doing, the more you would
consider him a true artist.

Well, a
knitter is an artist whose medium is yarn.

This line
of thinking altered my attitude to my stash, my half-finished projects, my
knitting process!  I am more
"okay" with it all.  And since
I am looking at my knitting with a bit more respect, I feel like treating it
all with more respect — and that means tidying it up and getting more projects
finished.  It also means I feel more free
to play and experiment, to rip out and re-do as I deem necessary — without
feeling that I am wasting my time. 

Whatever
a knitter's talent or level of expertise or amount of experience, she is an
artist and is entitled to the artistic process.