Thursday, July 25, 2013

When the Relationship is Over, But the Knitting Isn't

So, many of you know about the book, "Never Knit Your Man A Sweater*" Where the * refers to the subtitle that says something about getting the ring first.

Well, it has become my recent experience that the presence of the ring doesn't matter.  And it's not a new ring, it's a 21+ year-old ring that apparently no longer matters.

My question is, what do you do with works in progress that were intended for your soon-to-be Ex?  What do you do about the sweaters you made for him that need mending, but which you hadn't done before you realized your relationship was over?  Do you finish them?  Do you put them in a bag along with the rest of his stuff & let him deal with it one way or another?  Do you rip them out & recycle the yarn?

This is actually one of the hardest aspects of the divorce for me.  I only give my knitting to a very select group of people.  If you have knitting from me, it means your on my "A" list and quite important to me.  The same goes for any other handmade item, such as quilts or other sewn things.  Even my cooking.  I spend time, care and love in all of these activities.  It may look like I'm avoiding getting the laundry done to the rest of the world, but to me doing these things is how I show the people I care about the most that I do care about them.  I like the fact that I can take any number of raw materials (yarn, fabric, food) and turn it into something that can make another person happy.

So then what do you do when you have these projects that were started because you cared about the recipient, but now that's no longer true?  I'm very sentimental about my knitting.  I know that at least one of the WIP's in question will be impossible for me to finish.  I will hate every second I spend on it and that is not how I want knitting to be.  I also know that every time I look at the yarn for that sweater it will only bring up unpleasant emotions, and I can certainly do without that, which means that recycling it for my own use is also out of the question.  I think this one is getting ripped, recycled & shipped off to live with someone else.

The other WIP is a pair of socks, and while I'm not particularly wild about working on them either, I feel more obligated to finish them somehow.  Maybe because they have languished on the needles longer, or because they're smaller,  who knows?  But I feel like finishing them gives me a moral high road somehow. (Spiteful or revengeful knitting? I don't like the sound of that either.)  And so I feel stuck at the moment.

Suggestions as to how to become unstuck would be greatly appreciated.