Monday, April 25, 2011

Stitches


Recently on one of the yarn sites, someone asked: which do you prefer: knitting or crochet and why?

I like both,  but my stitches are uneven and with crochet that is less noticeable.  Also, crochet is faster, and I like to finish projects fast; I like to see results quickly.  I am a rather impatient person.  "Why do you have to do everything so fast?",  is a question I have heard all my life.  I have no answer.  It is just who I am: fast, furious, fanatical and frantic.  When I still worked as an RN, at times,  those were life saving qualities.  There's an upside to everything...

Knitting is slower and I also never learned it properly.  I knit holding a needle in each hand and letting go of the right needle to wind the yarn around it every stitch.  It is how my mother knitted.  I admire those who can hold the yarn around either their right forefinger and quickly zip it around the needle, or even more miraculously, I have seen people who hold the yarn in the left fingers, and the right needle appears to dive under it and come up with a stitch.  I have not been able to duplicate that.   Knitting gets much softer, pliable and even prettier results and some people knit as if it was done by machine. (Some machines knit like people...).   My stitches are, like I said, never all exactly the same.   Crocheted items appear to have more "body" are thicker, more sturdy, depending on the yarn used of course, and on the whole I prefer crocheting, but wish I were a better, prettier, more even knitter.

I am, surprisingly, a very good cross stitcher.  "All the cover stitches in one direction", I still hear the teacher in home ec class repeatedly whisper.  Guided by the canvas, I can follow like a sheep.  But not very often.  It is like listening to Bach: there is a beautiful mathematical, calming and almost mesmerizing  aspect to it.  To be moved to the depth of my soul, however, I prefer Brahms, Beethoven or Berlioz.

Do you ever think that the look of a person's stitches, may reflect aspects of their personality? I think so.  In some ways I am like my stitches: fast, at times uneven,  colorful, a bit chaotic, often original, a bit nervous and many-faceted.  What do your stitches reveal about you?


~ Tranquility and Tolerance ~

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