A few months ago I decided to take on the project of knitting a snake. Alex requested it from a book of stuffed animals and I set off on the task. More or less I just wanted to share some glamour shots of my really awesome snake, but I also learned a lot over those few months that I felt worthy to share.
Knitting is just as easy as it is complicated. The actual process of knitting isn’t terribly hard, but it’s when instructions throw in tons of acronyms you’re just supposed to know that things get tough. Over the course of this project I learned out to do a lot of knitting techniques I didn’t even know existed. Youtube became my best friend as well as asking my neighbor and knitting guru Amy for tutorials.
Knitting this snake also taught me that it’s ok if the project becomes a collaboration. Amy helped me loads on this snake from helping sew it together to figuring out how to make the eyes work when they looked completely wrong. At first I worried that the snake wouldn’t mean as much to me since I had a fair amount of help making it, but as we finished that final eye I couldn’t be more thrilled with what we accomplished. The project made me and Amy closer, made us spend more time together, and ultimately made the snake better. I’m definitely learning that asking and receiving help has its benefits. Just took me nearly 25 years to learn that!
There’s also a lot of spontaneous aspects to knitting which I definitely did not expect. To me knitting is just following instructions, but when the eyes looked seriously messed up, we had to get creative to salvage the whole project. There was a lot of “does this look right?” being thrown around those last few minutes of the project until we finally got them to look like eyes. Phew.
I also didn’t realize how long projects can take. I live in a world where if I’m working on something it’s usually done within the week (I’m looking at you stickers), but this project took literally months because I didn’t want to rush through it and make mistakes. I’m sure I could have finished it sooner, but there was so much I didn’t know about knitting that I wanted to ask questions and learn during the process. And I like that it took a while. Now that it’s finally finished I feel such a huge sense of accomplishment over something I labored over for longer than a week. It’s now on display in one of our guest bedrooms.
I may not knit anything to such a large scale for the next few projects, but I can already tell I’m much more of a knitter of stuffed creatures rather than scarves. Next on the docket will probably be doughnuts because well, why not?
Are you a knitter? What are your favorite things to knit?
