esCAPING Perfection

A friend's pretty daughter models the almost perfect capelet.
I still have to sew on five buttons.

Several days ago I finished a capelet I’ve been working on for several weeks.  After picking up stitches along one side of the opening in the front and knitting a couple of rows of garter stitch, I noticed an inconsistency—no, a glaring flaw—in my beautiful piece crafted with luxurious Louisa Harding yarn.  There were about six stitches in one of the vertical cabled bands of stockinet stitch that were not smooth.  They had the visible bumps of purl stitches. 

I had worked on this cape in the midst of planning a birthday party, working full-time, and running back and forth to my sons’ athletic practices and extra-curricular events.  I had also produced this item while taking part in a week-long blogging event, with required daily posts, and while dealing with a sick child and other family obligations.  So now, I faced a dilemma.    

This garment has a picot editing along the top, which miraculously, came out well and used exactly the correct number of stitches given in the pattern instructions.  I couldn’t bear to tear this edging out along with my picked up stitches along the front to correct an error that no one, without closely examining the capelet, would see.  Only I would know about this mistake.  Attesting to my perfectionistic nature, the flaw troubled me for several days, until I finally said, “Let it go,” as I have had to say about nearly everything since I’ve had children. 

This error, however, like so many times I have missed information in emails and posted on calendars or left my closets a mess or neglected to style my hair or groom the dog, is the product of a life pulled in different directions.  While some thrive on busyness and overbooked schedules, I find that I cannot produce any work of quality or substance, let alone anything “perfect” (if such things exist) without expanses of time to focus, free from distraction.  Hence the fact that my students’ essays and tests pile up, as I await that ideal, long stretch of time where I can sit quietly and work uninterrupted, that time which never comes, so I inevitably end up going to a Starbucks on a Saturday morning several days before the end of the marking period and frantically grading an obscenely large stack of papers, hoping I won’t get distracted by running into anyone I know.

My friend's younger daughter looks adorable in this lavender color.

The constant pull of committments and responsibiities and the constant need to prioritize and sacrifice duties to more pressing ones drives me nuts.  Yesterday, a huge mountain of laundry sat in the front of the washer and I was unhappily aware of the fact that my family hadn’t eaten a home-cooked meal in a week.  With obligations to be out every evening and starting an online course in website “accessibility” (which entailed hours of emailing the online instructor and questioning coworkers about how to actually find the magic link to access the course in which I was enrolled) and trying to plan a British tea party for my 12^th graders (which led to dragging china cups, tea pots, tablecloths, etc. to school), I was exhausted and knew that I should stay home and attempt to salvage some type of domestic life for my family. 

But I had decided several weeks ago that I needed to return to the horseback riding I had given up over a decade ago due to the fact that this activity takes away so much of my limited time with my family and for housework.  I’d done quite a bit of thinking and realized that if I continued to find reasons not to get back on a horse, I might never ride again.  Also, this hobby, I rationalized yesterday morning, should help me relax and aid in decreasing the stress in my life.  So after knitting a few rows on a cabled shawl (a Mother’s Day present which will certainly arrive late to my mother in Arizona, and which I’m also making as part of a  Ravelry knitalong,) and completing some household chores, I headed off for a thirty-minute drive to the country, where my husband’s sister and her husband have a horse farm.  I didn’t relax on the way there, however, as I was plagued by the fact that I hadn’t posted to my blog in nearly a week. 

Lace Shawl designed by Iris Schreier from Vogue Knitting Spring 2012 issue.   For information about joining the knitalong, go to Ravelry.  This shawl looks almost lavender here, but it's silver, made with Sublime yarn and beads I'm adding. 

I did ride, however, and enjoyed sunshine and country scenery.  My sister-in-law also gave me some yarn she’d obtained from a friend, whose mother, an avid knitter, had died recently.   The yarn is a mohair-acrylic blend and should go get along swimmingly with the other skeins and balls just waiting for me to have some time to work with them. 

Sina is a good-tempered Icelandic horse.  Go to Windgait, if you'd like
more information about Icelandics. 

After some errands, I was home for a few hours.  That evening, however, I drove out to the country again, to a horse farm owned by a former co-worker of mine.  A mutual friend is in town for a couple of weeks, and we were going to have a reunion, where we could sit by a bonfire and watch the “supermoon” this weekend (go to The Detroit Free Press) for information. In a weary haze, under a sky too cloudy to see the moon, I managed to last a few hours, before groggily heading home on some dark country roads and literally passing out from exhaustion

So today is a cloudy Sunday, perfect for knitting, blogging, and getting my 12-year-old son to work on his European country PowerPoint project for school. I’ll also continue to knit, attempting to find harmony and balance in perfectly crafted stitches.  I can’t let bumpy mistakes get me down.  I’ll carry these lapses along with me, and hope that I can be like the knitter in Knitting:  A Novel who totes all of her unfinished, flawed knitting pieces around with her in suitcases, until she learns a lesson in accepting human fallibility and is able to walk freely and unburdened by the baggage of her past mistakes. 

Had to add one more picture.