Finding inspiration

This week I have found my self revisiting a series I did a few years ago.

Years ago I used to knit hand warmers, scarfs, and hats.  What inspired me to knit little figures was the loss of a friend.  The kind of friend that keeps everything you tell them between you and them.  The kind of friend that will be honest with you, and the kind of honest that you need to hear depending on the situation.  He believed in me and my knitting.  When he passed away I was devastated.  I couldn’t eat, didn’t want to sleep and had a hard time doing much of anything.  I was unemployed, sad and didn’t know how to grieve for him.  It was also the holiday season.  Like salt in a wound.

While sitting on my couch in December, missing him, drinking coffee and hardly putting any effort into looking for a job I decided to reorganize my yarn stash for something to do.  I started to pull out all the left over balls of yarn, (you know, the ones that you can’t even knit one mitten out of) and put them into bags.  There were so many colors of yarn!  It was like a bag of brightly colored confetti.  I felt a moment of happiness before the sadness came right back.  I thought about my friend.  I learned a while ago that adding an action to my grieving was a good way for me to go through grieving.  When my father passed away gardening was how I grieved.  This time I knit.

The moments that change your life most often seem to be the worst moments or the best moments.  In one of the most difficult times of my life I found inspiration.  I knit.  I knit my friends, my family.  I knit my own version of people that I love.  I still don’t keep most of what I knit.  I have made over 100 of these little guys.  Little portraits of the people that mean something to me in one way or another.  I send out my pieces to those I care about.  I give them out for birthdays, I mail them out to people having a tough time, I send them to people that I love.  You never know what people are going through.  Sometimes all we need is to know that that someone is thinking about us.

So here I am, still knitting.