Knitting has seasons too

I got home last week from 8 days away and didn't want to do anything. Well, I wanted to cook (with the goal of recreating this amazing tomato galette I bought up there),

and I wanted to read, and knit. I'd started a sweater for Colton and I was pretty excited about it. I just wanted to sit on the couch with my Airpods in and have someone tell me a great story while I knit. I consumed fiction like it was my job. Which it isn't. My actual job is selling yarn and teaching people how to make sweaters that fit perfectly and look great. Coming back to that was harder than I thought it would be. What was wrong with me? I didn't want to straighten shelves. I didn't want to write. I just wanted to keep reading and keep knitting Colton's sweater.

Then I thought about tomatoes

What made that galette so amazing was the tomatoes.  Fresh, August tomatoes, perfectly ripened on the vine and sliced that day.  A tomato grown thousands of miles away, picked green, and shipped in a huge truck, would not be worth the trouble. They're both tomatoes, but one is in season and the other is not.   Spinach too.  Picked in the heat of summer it's bitter, almost unpleasant, but let it sit through a cold snap and the plant converts its starch into sugar, and suddenly it's sweet enough to eat raw off the stem. Same plant. Same soil. Different season -- entirely different thing.

There's a time for every purpose, as the line from Ecclesiastes goes. I don't think that means you can't eat tomatoes in January or knit a sweater when you're not in the mood for it. You can. People do it all the time. It just means the experience won't be what it could be if you waited for the right season -- timing is part of the actual chemistry of the thing.  

Knitting works the same way, and many of us knit as if it doesn't. Some people only knit in winter, when the needles feel like they belong in your hands and the finished sweater has somewhere to go. Some people only knit at night, after the day's noise has quieted down enough to hear their own stitches. Some people go completely dark on their projects all summer and feel guilty about it, like the yarn is judging them from the basket. It isn't. It's just not that season yet.

But here's what I got wrong at first, wondering what was actually the matter with me. It wasn't the knitting I was out of season with. I'd mostly finished Saila, and I was tearing through Colton's sweater because he'd asked me to make it -- a first -- and I just wanted to knit it for him.

It wasn't even the teaching. I still loved being at Flock Talk, and working live with knitters doing sweaters, because that's never felt like work. What I actually didn't want to do was the other part of running a yarn store -- the sales plans, the blog calendar, the marketing content. That's real work too, but it's not the same work as making something with your hands, and it's not the same as teaching, either. The making never needed a break. Neither did the teaching. The producing very much did.

Then school started, Colton welcomed a new class of third graders, and everything shifted. I don't know exactly why, but back to school resets something in me every year, like clockwork, even now, with no one of my own still in school. Maybe it's just the calendar doing what calendars do. But Friday, when I was in for Ginni, and Sunday, my usual day in the shop, everything felt good again. I was excited. That's a different feeling than the one I'd had most of last month, and the difference was palpable.

Maybe you've felt off from time to time -- distracted, uninterested, quietly avoiding something you usually love. I don't think that means anything is wrong. It might just mean it wasn't your season. Tomatoes in January are still tomatoes. They're just not what they could be. Neither is a project knit out of obligation rather than joy -- and neither is any kind of work done out of obligation rather than the thing that made you love it in the first place.

Crazy for Ewe -- the shop, the yarn, the classes, the club, the community -- is my joy, and I'm so glad my mojo is back. We've missed each other.

Warmly,
~Ellen