Energy Knitting

Sometimes we knit just for the love of the yarn, pattern, or color.  Sometimes we knit for the love of others and create wonderful gifts.  Sometimes we knit to get us through hard times.  I recently completed one of those projects.

I went through a really hard time not too long ago, and without going into details, I can tell you it filled me with tons of toxic emotions and thoughts.

When I'm toxic, I don't work on gifts for others or creative projects.  I believe strongly that doing so imparts that negative energy into the item I'm working on.  I work when I'm feeling positive and emotionally connected to the gift recipient or the project.  In fact,  I'd never done a "knit through difficult times" project before.

But this time, I just couldn't clear my mind.  I was really truly poisoned and I needed a way to cleanse my soul and work through my problems.  Knitting can be amazingly healing.  I pushed all my other projects aside and started a pair of socks.  I specifically chose a yarn from the bottom of my stash that I wasn't particularly fond of... okay, I straight up didn't like it.  The colors did nothing for me.  The texture was abrasive.  About the only thing going for it was I had enough for a pair of socks and it was superwash.  The plan: Knit ugly socks from yuck yarn while searching for serenity and trapping all my negativity and gift them away.

I worked on those socks every time my anger, hate, paranoia and bad emotions boiled to the surface.  I concentrated on my hate and frustration with each stitch.  I gave myself permission to hate the socks themselves and let others around me know that their existence served to detoxify me.  I stabbed needles through them and called them bad names.

And it worked.  I found myself cleansed and free of negativity just after the second heel.

And so they began their hibernation.  I suddenly had no need to work on them.  I had happier projects to focus on.

And then I found another problem.  I had to finish them.  They have to be finished in order to gift them away.  I briefly considered simply throwing the whole thing away, but what a waste.  I'd knit most of a perfectly good socks (I believe washing them could dispel my toxins), I had to finish them.  What I found was interesting... in hibernation the negativity had softened.  Even the yarn had softened.  In fact, my perspective had changed almost completely.  I still have some hurt kicking around, and I remember the stress, but I've found new ways to cope.

Who knows... maybe I'll keep the socks just to remind myself that good things can come from bad.