Sorry I’ve been a bit MIA on here: Life has been very busy, and my attention has been pulled in five different directions. To keep my nervous system calm, I use every free moment to knit, knit, knit, and the following list has gathered up in my brain like a German short row over the past few weeks, growing to a point where it could no longer be ignored. And so, the list no one asked for:

10 Lessons Knitting/Learning a New Hobby Has Taught Me:

1. Trust the process and be in the moment.

This is my biggest, most important takeaway. As a person with lifelong anxiety, I have a tendency to always be thinking — and worrying — ahead of time. Knitting forces you to focus on the task at hand.

Yes, there will be difficult moments ahead, but you can’t focus on that right now. Right now, the pattern calls for what the pattern calls for. When you get to page 5, worry about what’s on page 5.

Might not seem like much, but holy crapola, took me 53 years to learn this one and it’s had positive reverberating effects on other parts of my life.

2. Keep an eye on the big picture.

While my end goal is often to dupe some version of a Babaa sweater, when I’m in the nth hour of knitting stockinette in the round and I want to wrap things up so I can wear the damn thing, I have to remind myself to follow the directions and remember that my end goal is not a cropped sweater, it’s an oversized dropped shoulder sweater with a slight balloon fit that requires that I knit five more inches or whatever before I move on to the hem. If you want to achieve the goal you set out to accomplish, keep your eyes on the objective, rather than your impulsive desires. Sometimes impulsivity is fine! But it’s not a great seasoning for knit work.

3. Mistakes that require reworking are part of the process.

Sometimes you make an eyesore of a mistake on a row that you worked three hours ago and you don’t notice it until you’re almost done with a certain section. Sometimes, these mistakes can be fixed without undoing your work. Often, though, you have to “frog” your work — which means you “rip it, rip it, rip it” (get it?) back until you can redo the section that you messed up, and work forward from there all over again.

The first few thousand times this happens, it feels like a waste. “Dammit!” you might think. “I just lost four hours of work I’ll never get back.” But this is not a waste of time. This is part of the practice of knitting. There has to be a flexibility in the work you do, you have to be zen about it. You simply cannot get too attached to the rows you’ve knit because they may be imperfect and you will not wear the sweater if it has a terrible blemish right in the middle of the front, will you? That saying that we learn more from our failures than our successes is oh so true.

The acceptance that sometimes completed work is not “done” work has been a valuable life lesson for me as a 53 year old woman. I need to keep my mind open, flexible, agile, accepting, even when I’m not happy with the facts that are staring me in the face. Maybe it’ll all be okay in the end. It often is.

4. There is beauty in imperfection.

I’ve always been onboard with this idea, actually. Things that are too perfect arouse my suspicion. There will be quirks and blips and outright mistakes that only I can identify 99% of the time. Deal with it. That’s part of the unique beauty of a handmade item.

5. One can never have too many sweaters.

I can knit just about any design I want to, using any color or color combination I want to, in any yarn composition I want to. This is very empowering and I will soon have more sweaters than there is time to wear and I DO NOT CARE.

6. We never have a fixed identity in life.

Growing up, I was the writer, my middle sister was the athlete, and my youngest sister was the musical one. That was how our parents kind of categorized us, despite the fact that we all had a variety of musical, athletic, and intellectual abilities. Did your parents do this, too, or was this mostly only true for those of us who are Gen X? It’s not my parents’ fault that I never saw myself as artistic or crafty. Who knew that one could be artistic even if they couldn’t draw well!? This is still one of the great frustrations of my life — that I cannot draw or paint, no matter how hard I try.

But that’s just the thing. Maybe I can draw and paint? Maybe I haven’t been properly taught, and I haven’t properly practiced? Maybe, if I want to badly enough, I can learn how to do….anything?

7. Shortcuts are often a bad idea.

When I was first learning how to knit — and I’m fairly sure this is going to be true for any hobby, or when learning most new things — I was so focused on just trying to nail down a particular technique that I did not pay attention to directions that felt less important. This will probably only make sense if you knit or crochet, but, for example, if I had to pick up 22 stitches for a shoulder, I might pick up 34 on the right shoulder and 28 on the left shoulder instead, because that was what I was able to do as I was learning the technique. Later on, of course, I’d end up with two shoulders of different widths and realize that the number was there for a reason.

This isn’t something to chastise myself over. I think, at least for me, it was part of the learning process. Learn how to do the thing, and then learn how to do the thing right. And maybe I also had to learn from my mistakes there, too, as in “Danielle, you cannot ignore numbers even though you want to!” (Lifelong issue.)

I’m sure there’s a saying about this somewhere, but quite often, attempted shortcuts have ended up ruining projects entirely, or else they’ve often made my work take longer in the end. Like anything else, you have to be proficient in something before you can knit with any kind of surety that a shortcut is going to be a successful choice.

8. Knitting has emotional and psychological benefits that are priceless — for me, and also for humanity.

Sometimes I refer to my stash of handmade tops as ‘stress sweaters.’ I knit away all of my anxiety into them while listening to audiobooks, and I’ve become a happier and calmer person knowing that knitting is there for me to look forward to at the end of a workday, and as a way to channel both my stress and my creativity into something that creates rather than consumes. Sometimes, when I can’t fall asleep, rather than counting sheep, I imagine knitting, and it calms me right down.

Plus, there’s nothing like being in a flow state.

The positive effects of the rhythm of knitting are detailed in study after study.

This BBC article discusses a study that shows knitting and crocheting can help people to kick harmful habits like nail biting, skin picking, doom scrolling, and can provide a way to calm anxiety when learning better habits.

And for the crocheters, there’s this study published by the National Institutes of Health, with a shoutout to the title: Happy Hookers: findings from an international study exploring the effects of crochet on wellbeing.

9. Knitting has made me more present for my family.

Part of the reason I took up this new hobby is because my kids begged me to find something positive to do with my time rather than fussing over them as they got older and sought out more independence.

I have my own little knitting room where I spend much of my free time. It’s cozy, it’s bedecked in raspberries and pinks and florals. I am the lone female in my household (besides my dog Dory) and a gal needs a room of one’s own, right?

I had my husband take the door off of the room, and I’ve replaced it with a macrame curtain (kind of similar here). This way, I can be in here with a sense of privacy, but I can also keep an ear out for the rest of the house and never feel fully cut off from what’s happening outside of my little room.

Kids never really want to chat when you approach them. Especially as they get older, I find that they seek me out when they’re ready to chit chat, share, or need to talk through something. I got them this chair:

My kids know the macrame curtain is always open if they want to say hi, ask for money, request future grocery additions, pet the dogs that are probably hanging out in here with me, or just chitchat. And they do!

The dogs like to check in on me in here, too:

10. Overthinkers benefit from making tangible objects with their hands.

My jobs and my hobbies have always been very cerebral. I’ve always loved to read a lot, and I used to write books and short stories for fun. I don’t write books and short stories anymore. I’m not sad about it. If I want to return to that one day, I will.

And to be perfectly honest, writing books and short stories did not work well with my life. Back then, I was raising younger kids and working full time, and something had to give. The writing gave. This is not sad, and it wasn’t truly a lifelong passion for me. I just always felt the need to be creating something — writing a poem, attempting (very badly) to draw, I’d taken mambo classes, weaving on a loom classes; you name it, I tried it. Nothing ever stuck — until I learned to knit.

Knitting works really well with the stop-start nature of parenting and with being engaged in my life. I can put down my knitting mid-row and come back to it without worrying that I’ve lost my train of thought. I don’t really have to fully utilize my brain for long swaths of knitting, and I still get a very fulfilling sense of accomplishment at the end of a project because I have something cool to wear! It’s actually such a relief to free my brain to wander, to daydream, to tune into a book or a podcast or a great television show (Ironically, the show Shetland was one of my favorite shows to watch while knitting. It’s a great detective series set on the Scottish island of Shetland where people wear fantastic hand knit sweaters a lot.)

This might not feel like an important lesson from knitting, but for a person like me, knitting has given me relief from my incessant overthinking.

*One final point worth mentioning is that like any other article of clothing, sometimes I will knit something that I don’t end up wearing very often. That’s okay, too. Just because I haven’t found a good use for a piece yet doesn’t mean I won’t one day. Those are the pieces that get to stay in my closet rather than be sent out into the world of the circular fashion economy.

I’m currently working on the Ozetta Lakes V-Neck Pullover using Cascade 220 Superwash Merino in Dark Teal held with Knitting for Olive Pure Silk in Blue Tit (hehe).

Next up, I’m making the Hanni Cardigan by Knitters & Friends:

Which I will be making with Knitting for Olive Heavy Merino in Pomegranate:

This future project was inspired by this note from Jasmine Sikand (who used the exact same yarn, but a different pattern than I’m planning to use) because how gorgeous is this cardigan she made and how amazing does she look in it!?:

Inspired!

Here are the last few pieces I’ve made, most of which you may have already seen:

If you want the names of any patterns or yarns used here, let me know!

Here are some other posts I’ve written about knitting that you might find helpful:

*Please note that this post does use affiliate links, some of which may provide me with a small commission at no extra cost to you.

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For example, right now I am wearing this outfit:

I had to drive my son to the gym so I temporarily added shoes, and grabbed my current bag for this quick photo:

Clearly, I have not exposed my skin to the sun this summer. I am an indoor cat and except for daily walks around the neighborhood I am not really catching any rays, which is why my legs resemble uncooked chicken. I am thankful for blush, vitamin D supplements, and the relaxation time summer affords me, since my job keeps me extremely busy and thoroughly exhausted most of the year. One positive aspect of working outside of the house is that I have plenty of places to wear the cute clothes hanging in my closet. But off days are drawer clothes days, and those aren’t quite as photogenic.

Here are some of the outfits I have been cycling through over the past few weeks (I’ve barely taken any photos, so this is the best of what I’m working with record-wise):

#SkortsForLyfe:

In my Comfort Tee:

It’s actually been kinda cold this summer here in New York!

Depop $3 shirt for the win:

Went to buy some plants:

A Day of Errands in the Rain:

Forced to leave the house and not thrilled about it:

Fanciest lounge outfit I wear:

None of these outfits are particularly noteworthy. They’re probably not considered newsletter worthy. But these around-the-house or okay-if-I-must-leave-the-house-I’ll-wear-this-just-add-shoes-and-mix outfits are a real part of my real life.

And honestly? I love this part of my life. Days with no obligations are mine to fill and I want to be comfortable yet somewhat presentable in whatever it is that I wear. I need to be able to put a basil plant in a pot of dirt, do the dishes, knit a sleeve onto a sweater, welcome the appliance repair person, drive my son to the gym, then take a walk around the block with my husband and my uncooked chicken legs. I’m not thinking about color blocking and wrong shoe theories and third pieces at those moments, not really, unless I want to! And I usually don’t want to because I’m too busy planning where I’m going to get steak for dinner and when I’m going to pick up my medicine from CVS between driving my son to get a new protein powder and then dropping off a package at the post office.

This is where exercise clothing comes in for me. I don’t exercise, beyond those daily walks with my husband. But my days are active enough and I need clothes that are suitable for lots of movement, and crouching, and contorting myself into strange positions as I enter the umpteenth hour of knitting a round or writing a newsletter. White cotton mini dresses trimmed with embroidery don’t quite cut it for days like these. The same goes for the fabrics: I’m wearing lots of “nylon” shorts these days (read: polyester) and other synthetic materials that can stand up to busy days, that splashes of water barely affect, that can be thrown in the washer and dryer over and over again. My favorite pair of shorts for this purpose are from Athleta and were purchased in 2022 (they’re the ones I’m wearing in that first pic of this newsletter.)

You will notice that I choose mostly black for my summer pieces; it’s so easy to mix and match that way. I do have some colorful pieces, too, though!

What I’m Actually Wearing This Summer:

I’ve owned these particular Asics Gel 1130s for a while and although I’m not crazy about anything with laces (Converse aside), I love these.

I’m not a bike shorts wearer but they do seem do have cozy lounge day possibilities:

Okay, hear me out: This is a little bit fancy for house wearing, but an Agnes B. snap cardigan is a great addition for a lounge day that requires being seen by someone who doesn’t live with you. (And of course it’s also great for life in general.) It’s made from a plush, sweatshirt-like material, and wears like a fancy sweatshirt that adds a little structure over a slouchy tee, plus interest. They can be found in a panoply of colors. One day I hope to own one in every hue. Do your research about sizing, though, the sizing of these can be quite confusing, and I once purchased one that was probably made for a child, which is a shame, because it was a vibrant cobalt blue.

Here is a red Agnes B. snap cardigan, which you can purchase new from their website:

You can find these all over the secondhand market as well in even more colors than what’s currently available new. eBay has tons! I bought two from eBay, both were mailed from Asia, and got to my house in New York super quick. I can’t guarantee that your experience would be the same, but do check out your seller’s reviews if you go the eBay/secondhand route. I wore my brownish red one for “A Day of Errands in the Rain” (see photos near the top of this post) with black Levi 501 90s and my Asics, and it was a super comfy, put together outfit.

I will be wearing the cozy lounge clothes featured in today’s post probably until mid-October at least, though the shorts will likely have to be swapped out for leggings or sweatpants if I plan to leave the house. Fashion people often advise us to spend more on investment pieces that will last forever, but I’m glad I’ve invested some real time, thought, and money into lounge clothes that help me to feel like my style-loving self even when I’m sitting cross legged on a beanbag chair eating takeout sushi and watching The Parisian Agency on Netflix. I’ve been wearing some of these pieces for three to five years now, and it’s clear they’ll last a lot longer.

What’s your favorite lounge wear ‘fit? Please share!

You can find all the looks from today’s post here.

*Please note that this post does use affiliate links, some of which may provide me with a small commission at no extra cost to you.

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