Everything I need to know...
One of my favorite things about knitting is the life lessons I find there. One of these days I might write “Everything I Need to Know About Life I Learned in Knitting.”
Take the Fog shawl. I spent the last week looking for a shortcut or a hack to make my endless rows of KTOG TBL—knit two together through the back loop—easy. Or fun. Or at least more effortless.
Tonight, as I slogged through more latticework and started to calculate how much longer it’d take before I “couldn’t stomach it anymore (per the “recipe” directive), I realized there isn’t a shortcut or a hack to be had. Sure, I could spend money on a different set of needles, but it would probably still be frustrating work. The simple truth was that if I wanted the beauty, I had to put in the work.
I spend a lot of time teaching productivity to writers. In every class, there’s always someone looking for the secret handshake that will get them to the end of their book with less work. There isn’t one. The only way to write a book is to write one (or pay someone to ghostwrite it for you). Life, like knitting and like writing, doesn’t work on shortcuts.
And so I’m back at it with renewed patience and endurance, knitting through those pesky back loops with new wisdom: it’s like life. Do the work if you want the outcome.
Speaking of writing outcomes, I’ll take this opportunity for a little shameless knitting novel promotion. My latest release, Coming Home to Texas, features a knitting heroine, a knitting class, and the process of making bison yarn. And the most romantic solution to the Boyfriend Sweater Curse you could ever imagine, if I do say so myself. You might like it!
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