lessons from a traffic report

So a while back I was listening to a traffic report. Yes, I know my city and the streets he's discussing. But for the life of me, I am having trouble processing what's he's saying . . . because he's saying it too quickly. I think I was trying to visualize the intersection, and by the time I got close, I'd have lost the information. (Maybe the visualization was happening in the right brain, but the language required me to go to the left, and I was unable to do the to and fro as quickly as the information was coming.)

So then I wondered Has anyone called in and asked him to go more slowly? Am I the only one?

And then the light bulb went off!!!

At moments when I am teaching, especially at the end of class, I occasionally see blank stares after an instruction. With apologies that always accompany the request, I am then asked to repeat what we all know is a simple instruction. I will do so, often saying That's okay: at the end of a class, I say left hand and you hear yarnover (which sounds silly but is actually true).

But the day of the traffic report I then realized that my students were having the same experience! Even though I am very precise in my language, and I try my best to be clear, I am--at this moment in class--speaking too quickly. My students are hearing the language but also trying to establish the visual. I need to give them more time to do so.

So in my last two teaching venues, I have tried to keep this in mind. And I really do believe that the classes at Rumpelstiltskin Yarns (Sayville, NY) and Creative Yarns (Macon, GA) were the best. I do love all my classes and all my students, but I do believe there was a perceptible difference, and I think it was because I deliberately slowed down towards the end of class.

For those who have never taken one (and I do suspect I am preaching to the choir here), knitting classes are great fun, and time passes very quickly, but at the end you are worn out! Who knew it could take this much energy!? But if you have this reaction, you have likely learned a lot and know it was all soooooo worth it!

Speaking of classes, I am often asked if I will be in Ohio, NY, Florida . . . anytime soon. That information is on my website: www.sallymelvilleknits.com under SCHEDULE.

And speaking of my schedule, I am really excited about an upcoming venue.

In May, I will be teaching at the Grand Hotel (from the movie of the same name) on Mackinac Island (northern MI for those who don't know). What a gorgeous venue! Who wouldn't want to get inside this place?

But you know who would very much like to do so? A girl who went to high school just north of there (Sault Ste Marie, ON CA), who went to Mackinac Island on dates and for high school graduation, who stared longingly at this landmark hotel, who thought that ever getting inside was unattainable. And that would be me!

Just goes to show you, as they say about knitting and baseball and all things wonderful: you never know!

launch day!

Today is a day of celebration for me. It's the day my last, and most anticipated (at least by me), and most comprehensive book launches.

So how can I say those things?

last book
I know myself to be primarily motivated by teaching. Believe it or not, I never set out to write pattern books : I set out to teach, and the patterns were merely support for that. (I know that's a rather odd thing to hear when I am probably most known for a single pattern: The Einstein Coat. But teaching you to knit it was actually my primary goal.)




Even in Sally Melville Styles (my first book, on using up leftovers), I did not intend to include patterns. The garments I made to support the principles I was teaching were meant as illustrations: I was actually surprised when my editor suggested we publish them!

So it's in this book that I teach pretty much everything I know about producing great garments. I've dumped my knitting brain on the page and don't think I have anything else to teach.

 By the way, that same editor asked me "how many books I had" in me. I answered "I think seven," At the time, I had no idea where that number came from. It just sounded good (and isn't usually considered a lucky number?)

This book is number seven!

most-anticipated book
This is the book I've always wanted to write.

My knitting career started with this material. In the late 1970's, I wrote a 100-page manual (and called it Advanced Knitting Design). I taught it at my local yarn shop, my students and I established what was (at the time) the largest knitters' guild in Canada, we brought in teachers from abroad, those teachers pushed me out onto the international stage . . . and the rest is my professional life.

 It feels wonderful to offer this book, taking me back to my roots and allowing me to say thank you to the craft I love and that has given me the life I have.

most-comprehensive
This is where I put all the tools I have into your hands.

This is where you will learn skills that will keep your whole brain alive and healthy.

This is where you will find everything I can offer to make you a fully-empowered knitter!

It is based upon the premise that everyone one of us should be able to do the following:

• go to our closet, 
• find a garment we love but did not knit, 
• measure it,
• draft it,
• knit it, 
• finish it,
• wear it with pride,
• honour our craft!

To finish, here is my own example of how you might use the book.

I have a black vest I've worn forever and ever. Very simple, probably 20 years old. I have often told myself that I should knit it. And so I finally did--a simple round-necked vest, with deep set-in-sleeve armholes, with straight-sides . . . and with a bit of an edge in its unexpected use of zippers.

I will call it Zip-Study Vest, and the pattern itself will appear on Ravelry some day.

But in the meantime, the book offers you all the tools you need to do this for yourself. When you do this, the result really can--and might--be this simple. But these are the garments that are the staples of our wardrobe and that we wear day in and out.

This is how I work, and this is what the book offers you. Enjoy!

balance through change

This should have been posted Feb 23: I was just too busy to get to it!

Also a warning: while I do come around to knitting in the end, this is more personal than usual.

You've heard all that good stuff: change is constant, life is change, the more things change the more they stay the same, etc. But no matter how much we are supposed to embrace it, change is rattling!

I am facing a big change. It's a change I chose, it's a change I have looked forward to, it's a change I am to be envied for. So why, for the past week while I've been packing up everything I own, have I felt grief-stricken and profoundly disturbed?

I probably need to re-learn and re-confirm some lessons I learned long ago.

lesson one

 Many years ago, something wonderful happened to my son: he won what seemed at the time a major piano competition, and he was only 12. We were so very excited for him,  . . . but it had a terrible outcome for us! He was much younger than the other competitors, but we were encouraged to allow him to stay in a university residence with the others . . .  and where we were told there would be adult supervision. But there was none--other than the lovely, teenaged, female competitors who kindly took him under their wing (which he adored). 

So this kid came home telling us that we couldn't tell him what to do anymore! He had designated himself an adult overnight (after all, he had lived like one for 4 days), and we plunged headlong and without warning into . . . unpleasantness.

The lesson from that experience was that no matter how good something seems, there's always a down side to it. 

lesson two

 And the obvious corollary would be that no matter how bad something seems, there's a lesson to be learned that will make sense of it.

lesson three

 And if nothing is ever wholly good or wholly bad, then nothing should be able to shake our foundations too terribly much.

This last lesson was sorely tested 4 years later when a much bigger change assaulted me and my 16-yr-old son and 14-yr-old daughter: my husband and their father died. Staying balanced through that was very hard but necessary. (After all, I had two teenagers at home!). 

lesson four

 From it I learned another lesson for survival-through-change. Find out what you believe in, and keep a steady grip on that.

No matter what storm is going on around us, we need to find what gives us meaning and hang on for dear life. I did that after my husband died, I did that after the heartbreak of my professional life (when my relationship with XRX ended), and I've done that through subsequent difficulties.

and now . . .

 So now a lovely change looms: I am leaving my condo to move into a house I have bought with my daughter and her (builder) husband. In 4 days I will move into their part of the house while they build an apartment for me; when it's done, I'll move into it; then after their part of the house is renovated they'll move in. We should all be enjoying the yard and pool by mid-summer.

So what's to mourn? In the end, it'll be wonderful! But it all came a little too early. (I guess that's the other thing about change: we can't always pick its timing?) I am not ready to leave my space and neighbourhood, so I am feeling a little sad as I pack.

lesson five

 Maybe there's the final lesson: it's okay to grieve. Despite all the comfort we can find from those other lessons, it's still okay to feel sad. If we swallow what ails us, doesn't that make us sick? And if I don't acknowledge my sadness, then I won't go looking for these lessons I've learned that help me get through it!

This whole thing is reminding me of mistakes in knitting.

    Acknowledge the mistake.

    Feel sad for a bit.

    Learn the skill needed to fix it.

    Fix it . . . and create something wonderful!

    Start a new project!

We love you Ryan!

So, Ryan Gosling was asked, by GQ in Australia, how he would spend his perfect day. His surprisingly lovely reply was “knitting.”

Here’s how he continued.

"I did this scene in Lars And The Real Girl where I was in a room full of old ladies who were knitting, and it was an all-day scene, so they showed me how. It was one of the most relaxing days of my life.

"If I had to design my perfect day, that would be it. And you get something out of it at the end. You get a nice present. For someone who wants an oddly shaped, off-putting scarf."

We will happily forgive him his suggestion of the old lady and oddly-shaped knitting stereotypes. Because, really, who saw this coming? And what might this do for our craft?

I wrote, in the November 19^th post, that one of the reasons knitters don’t get the respect they deserve is that men don’t do it. Something that is considered exclusively female just doesn’t get the credibility, mileage, or respect of something that is gender-shared. That’s just the way the world has worked for a very long time. (Never mind that the original knitters’ guilds were men only. That was a long time ago and now easily dismissed.)

Once the industrial revolution hit, and knitting (and the men who did it) went into the factories (where the money was made), hand-knitting became almost exclusively female: women at home did it because it was cheaper than buying the factory-made goods. That marginalized hand-knitting in a world that was increasingly motivated by profit.

Fast forward to modern times, where—with globalization—a hand-knit sweater is much more expensive than what we can buy in stores. And if money were the only currency, you’d think this would make knitting precious and special. But, no, people (well, really, women) who knit were people with enough disposable income and time that they could make what they could easily buy. In a world increasingly motivated by expediency, knitting made even less sense to people who didn’t do it!

It seems that we can’t win for losing!

But thank goodness for the movie stars. Someone watches Julia Roberts knitting, or hears her rave about it, and knitting is hot and sexy and the new best ever thing. (That’s what happened at the turn of the century.)

And now we have one of our hottest male stars saying the same thing! OMG, how fabulous! I cannot wait to see how this unfolds! Maybe knitting will become the best new trend among gorgeous young men! The possibilities surely make this old heart beat faster. 

PS If you have not seen Lars and the Real Girl, you now clearly must. (It really is a lovely movie. But even if it weren’t, it’s probably something we all must do in support of our new guy?)

What keeps us from moving forward?

My last post, plus the New Year, lead me to address the following (posed long ago on Ravelry): "I keep wanting to experience new things with my knitting. But then I go back to what I know how to do. I seem to be stuck somewhere within my comfort and can't seem to blast myself through that wall that's preventing me from moving forward."

I have a virtual arsenal of quotes, and stories, and opinions on this subject. And I'll begin that assault in a moment. But before I do, just let me say that while we can speak to this from our heads, we cannot think ourselves out of this place of safety. It is our feelings—usually fear—that need be conquered. So while you read what follows, listen to what resonates emotionally.  If you feel something, a button has been pushed . . . and that's where you need to go looking.

Okay. Let's start with a concept that I embrace.

There is no such thing as a mistake.

How in the world can I say that? Because you cannot be born knowing everything there is to know. (There are people who think they are, but we're grateful we're not married to them.) Your parents, your teachers, your knitting instructors could not anticipate and teach everything you need to know.

So . . . there are things you don't know and mistakes you are capable of making. And you will make them . . . until they bite you . . . and you think That isn't serving me very well. And so you do the work to learn what you need to learn to not make that mistake again.  And what can we conclude from this?

If we are capable of making a mistake, then we needed to make that mistake in order to learn what we needed to learn to not make that mistake again. And so the mistake is just an experience we needed to have so we could learn and grow.

Maya Angelou said it much better: You did the best you could until you knew better. And when you knew better you did better.

If all that seems too theoretical, let me give you a practical example, paraphrased from the book Art and Fear, by David Bayles and Ted Orland.

On the first day of class, the pottery teacher announced a new way the class would be graded. The half sitting to the right would be graded on quality (the usual way): one perfect pot would earn an A, etc. The half sitting to the left would be graded on quantity: 50 lbs of pots would earn an A, 40 lbs a B, etc.

When grading occurred, a curious fact emerged: the pots of best quality came from the quantity side of the class. That side had turned out lots of pots, exploring ideas to produce some really good work. The quality side, on the other hand, had produced no wonderful pots: they had sat theorizing about the perfect pot rather than putting in the hours of trial and error to actually get there.

Unless we dive into our materials and just give it a go, often what holds us back from moving beyond our comfort is fear—of frustration, of failure, of waste (time or money?), of humiliation.

How do we deal with our fears? By embracing the following truths.

• Frustration is painful but an inevitable step on the road to learning. As Winston Churchill said Creativity is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
• There is no such thing as failure. As Henry Ford said Failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.
• I believe that there is no such thing as a waste of time. Our left brain, which is the clock-watcher, is also where established patterns reside. So when we try to establish a new pattern, this side of the brain feels out of control,  gets critical, and accuses us of wasting time. This is no reason to give up. And fortunately, knitting is a right brain activity in which time is irrelevant. (I truly believe that whatever we are doing in any given moment is exactly what we were meant to be doing in that moment. This helps me get through life.)
• There is no waste of money in knitting: we are much to be envied because we can rip out our materials and re-use them.
• And finally, humiliation is something we do to ourselves. (No-one can do it to us unless we let them.) And why would we do this to ourselves? We should treat ourselves as we would a grandchild.

So, what to do when we find ourselves stuck? *Try something new. Be prepared for frustration. Ignore the yammering left brain. Be persistent. Be prepared for mistakes. (Understand that these are lessons to learn before proceeding.) Learn (or teach yourself) every fix-it technique available to knitters. Employ them until you achieve success. Repeat from *.

And, sadly I suppose, be prepared to produce an occasionally truly ugly sweater. We could have a competition. But I promise you I'd win! I'd have to, if only because—over 56 years of knitting—I’ve produced a great volume. But I look at these sad pieces and comfort myself with a quote by Chekov: One would have to be God to look at both success and failure and know one from the other.

flow, persistence, and buyer’s remorse

Flow

The other day I watched a documentary on happiness which talked about the concept of flow as being an essential component. It mentioned knitting as a way to achieve flow, which made me think of re-visiting this subject.

The word’s been around for a long time to describe a state of being we might all wish to achieve. But the American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi gave it a particular definition and set of parameters that should help us understand and achieve it.

He made a simple, two-axis scale in which skills oppose challenge. And his premise for a state of flow—which he called the flow channel—is that we achieve it when skills = challenge.

 But Csikszentmihalyi went further—describing the states we are in when outside the flow channel. And here’s where things get more interesting and—I think—instructive.

If challenge is too high for our skill level, we are anxious, frustrated, stuck. If skills are too high for the task, we are bored. And the kicker is that human beings are much less happy when they are bored!

So what does that mean for us?

Persistence

Let’s just establish that knitters are never bored and look to the other side of Csikszentmihalyi’s chart.

It’s not difficult to get frustrated with our knitting: wrong yarn, wrong pattern, wrong level of challenge, wrong garment for our body, wrong garment for our wardrobe. The mistake, however, would be to pitch the project. Much better to

• figure out what’s wrong with it,
• rip it out,
• do the work to fix it.

When we do this, we produce a result that’s worthy. And—in doing the work of figuring, ripping, re-figuring, and re-knitting—we raise our skill set. And so the next time we tackle a similar project, we are higher in the flow channel! This is a result much to be desired and remembered every time we pack away a not-wonderful knit result.

Buyer’s remorse

So we’ve all bought clothing we should not have. The sales person told us we looked “cute” (not a word I think should ever be attributed to my 63-yr-old self, so there was my first clue), or maybe it was “on sale” (but what kind of bargain is it if I never wear it?!?!), or maybe we were having a good hair day or out-of-body experience (so everything looked good). Whatever! Been there, done that! (Hang with me, this does relate to my previous discussion.)

I have had this experience many times with clothing . . but . . . never with yarn!!!!! I have never regretted a yarn purchase!!!

Yes, I’ve knit with yarn that didn’t work out. But even so, I have not regretted the purchase. I’ve just learned that it was the wrong project for the yarn. Good lesson! And what comes next? Rip and re-knit!

Imagine how lucky this makes us! No buyer’s remorse because we can use this yarn again. Add to that an opportunity to raise challenge and enter the flow channel at a higher level because we’ve learned something that raised our skill level. Nothing to regret no matter the outcome!

Is this New Year’s Optimism speaking? I think not. This is the nature of my world, a place I happily inhabit!

the two dumb questions

There are two questions, incomprehensible to knitters, that we are frequently asked.

• How much does it cost to make a sweater?
• How long did it take to knit that?

I’ve been asked this by strangers (to be expected) but also by knitters (even yarn company owners, which really astounded me). How in the world are these reasonable questions?

As I see it, there are three ways to respond.

Response number one

Open-mouthed astonishment: as if to say Did you really mean to ask such questions? Would you like to take that moment back?

It's a valid response, but no-one learns anything. So let's move on.

Response number two

Try to get to the root of these questions.

How much does it cost to make a sweater?

• How much does it cost to knit which sweater?
• Do you really want to know what I spent on yarn for this cashmere piece you are admiring?
• Do you want to know because you want to be shocked that anyone could be so impractical? Will it confirm what you’ve always suspected about me—my inane frivolousness?
• Or do you want to know because you want it to be within your budget, something you could now consider. (I’d love to believe this last.)

How long did it take to knit that?

• How many months, days, weeks, hours? How precise would you like me to be?
• What’s a day’s knitting? 2 hours, 6 hours, 10 hours? Do you think I knit with a stop watch beside me?
• Do you want to know because you want to be shocked that anyone could be so impractical? Will it confirm what you’ve always suspected about me—my inane frivolousness?
•  Or do you want to know because you want it to be within your time allowance, something you would now consider? (I’d love to believe this last.)

I usually do some of the above, but not well, and still no-one really learns anything. So lets move on.

Response number three

I’m reading a really interesting book—The Watchman’s Rattle—about how to solve complex problems. The author discusses the five barriers we need overcome to think clearly and to save civilization.

The fifth barrier is extreme economics—simple principles in business, such as risk/reward and profit/loss, that are the litmus test for determining the value of people and priorities, initiatives and institutions. Knitters fail the test of extreme economics when they spend money knitting something they could readily buy at a fraction of the price.

In addition, she says When business principles prevail, there is enormous pressure for individuals to respond to complex problems with great speed and efficiency. Knitters also fail this test of extreme economics when they spend hours knitting something they could readily buy in a fraction of the time.

Make no mistake. She is saying that to overcome complex problems and save civilization as we know it, we need to

• reject the need for profit,
• reject the need for speed.

So, what does that have to do with us?

Knitters are leaders in these exercises! The fact that we can’t answer how long and how much should be a proud moment for knitters! Why? Because, unlike the rest of the world, we will not be ruled by time or money. We do what we do because it is the right thing to do—for our minds, our health, our families, our economies (all of which are discussed in previous posts).

I would suggest that the best that humans produce—our good works, our good institutions, anything that has changed our quality of life for the better—can never be reduced to time or money.

And there’s our best answer!