Recovering (?) Type-A

Quick! Name something that comes back to "bite you in the butt" in life! I'll start...

PERFECTIONIST PERSONALITIES!

You know what else starts with P? That's right, Pretty starts with P, and Pretty has a perfectionist personality PLUS. As a recovering type-A (am I recovering though, or just continually backsliding?), I make mistakes then berate myself pretty hard on a fairly regular schedule. It's partly rushing (because I love a finished task), and partly doing too many things at one time (I'm doing this and this and this...might as well do that too), which is not an equation for perfection, but failure. It's like being impatient to finish a hand-knit sweater, maybe because I also want to finish the matching socks and bake some cookies, so I convince myself that a mistake isn't a mistake until I've bound off a sweater that has three sleeves! 

Special Note: This knitter, like most knitters, has only two arms. Thankfully, that is also true of the sweater she is currently working on...

Still, there is evidence all over my world of the mistakes I've made. Some of my blunders were bigger than others, and I am most thankful for the ones I have owned up to, shared with appropriate people, and learned from. 

I am thankful that I had another opportunity to learn to slow down again this week. Error Ahoy! Believe me when I tell you that I am not continually thankful for this mistake or any other, but in hindsight I am hopeful that I have learned from it. In this moment, what I am always thankful for is the people God has surrounded me with. The ladies in my Bible study have prayed for me as I floundered through the week, and they brought me back from the brink of feeling badly and beating myself up to admitting guilt and working through it. Ultimately, there was nothing I could do (this time) to fix the flub, so I admitted fault and apologized profusely while I prayed and knit my way through it, almost finishing sock 1 of a new pair as well as the progress on the sweater. 

All of that to say this: Everyone makes mistakes, and errors are almost always inconvenient. Nobody died, so it could be worse, and isn't that a good place to sit? As long as I can say, "It could be worse," I know it's probably going to be ok. This is true all throughout life, whether it refers to my mistakes or the consequences of another's actions, and I have been in situations that I don't think could have been worse...but most of life is somewhere between "Great!" and "Can't-Get-Worse," so that's where I live best. Could it be worse? Yes? Then it's going to be ok! Maybe not "Great!," but that's what a recovering Type-A needs to know...it doesn't have to be perfect. Sometimes ok is truly OK!

Are you like me, a straight-A student that can't let go of that one B in 7th grade, or the mistake that she made last week? Or are you gentle with yourself because not one of us is perfect? I hope you tend toward the latter, as it is a kinder and gentler way to treat both with yourself others. If you're struggling like I am, I hope you'll hop up onto the bus. When we struggle and grow together, we all get a little further down the road. 

Thanks for stopping by, and Knit in Good health!

Just the Same, Right?

Playing with yarn is not for the faint of heart. There are patterns to follow (or not), gauge swatches are a necessity (or not), and a lot of pressure to create each and every stitch or knot with utter perfection (or not)! Playing with yarn can become intense, especially if you are making a game of it. (Did I hear someone say Yarn Chicken?*) 

Take, for example, my friends Michelle and Andrea, who are participating in a crochet-a-long (CAL) to make this Mosaic Bucket Bag. Doing KALs and CALs with friends is fun! It is not stressful at all...until you get to knit night and notice this:

Same pattern. Same yarn (even the colors, quite by accident). Same hook size (even the same brand, though there is only one in the photo). Very. Different. Sizes. There were jokes about size, about tension, about loose women...err crochters...these bags are a good illustration for life.

Life does not come with formal instructions or a pattern. We all look around and do our best to figure out which steps to take, which places to go, which people to share our lives with (or not). We all start out with just about the same everything...but once we enter into this life, all that same is somehow different. 

In the pattern, a single crochet is a single crochet is a single crochet, right? Look again at the start of those two bags! Same hook, same yarn, same stitch, same number of stitches...very different fabric!

I was born to parents who gave me a younger sister. Same parents, same house to live in, same gender, same schools, same just about everything! Yet, we are wildly different. She does not knit, for one thing. She is single. She has a dog...a dog! (The cats have just run yeowling out of the room at that!) We run in different circles, with different crowds. She is a bit of a rebel, I am a conformist. Put us side-by-side on the couch, and we look similar...but we are not the same.

In knitting, I know my gauge with certain worsted weight yarns. As long as I am knitting back and forth, I will get 4.5 stitches to the inch almost every time. Knit in the round, and it is often a different story, sometimes by a full half-stitch! "What's half a stitch?," I might think to myself. Well, over the course of the inches it would take me to make myself a sweater in that yarn, I could be off by as much as 15 inches. That is catastrophic and predictable, but also surprising to me. Every. Single. Time.

There are certain things we all know about life, too. Things like "What goes around comes around," in general. Most of the time, it holds true. But sometimes you really go out of your way to be nice to someone, and they kick you in the teeth. Sometimes you make a mistake, a really big mistake that you knew better about, and you are still shown undeserved grace and forgiveness. Sometimes these are little things, and sometimes they are mind-blowing big, but it always seems a significant surprise when things happen in ways that I have not anticipated. 

When my friends and I knit and crochet, we know that our finished object will very likely not look like the picture on the pattern. It may be because we are using a different colored yarn, or perhaps our gauge is off, or maybe we have ripped and totally redesigned the whole thing along the way. (Right Corrie?) Whatever the differences, in needle-crafts we often call them "design elements." 

I have a lot of design elements in the fabric of my life. There are places I have messed up (dropped stitches or friendships or good habits/manners), places I have added interest (learning from my mistakes or going out of my way to do something unnecessary), and places that I have embellished the good to minimize the things that are not so pretty (hello, social media). Each of these elements has helped to shape me into the person that I am: a Jesus lover who strives to love people and knit a lot along the way.

What makes up your fabric? Are you getting gauge, or doing a re-design? How many unexpected things have happened to you this week, and how are you handling it all?

Life is a wild ride. Thanks for stopping by to share it with me on a Saturday afternoon!

Knit in Good Health, friends. Knit in Good Health!

*Yarn Chicken is a game in which the knitter (or crocheter) hopes beyond hope (and usually without measuring anything) that the yarn she (he) has will be enough for the current project. A win is having enough yarn leftover to be able to weave in the final end. A loss involves weeping and gnashing of teeth, raiding your friends' stashes or shopping for more of that yarn in that color, and sometimes a citrus vodka & tonic. It is a fun and stupid game at the same time.