WIP | Knitting Something from Scratch

Transforming your hobby (in my case knitting) into a business sounds like a dream come true, but the reality is something quite different. Things started out simple enough. I found ways to make my hobby time do double duty while I swatched and knit samples. Gradually, the hobby I loved became something else... WORK. Knitting was no longer something I could turn to for a creative release.

I think the same outcome can gradually occur to knitters who push themselves to produce (or at least cast on) a lot of projects. In this era of over-consumption there's always a new yarn to buy, a popular knit along to join and endless social media posts showing some amazing must-try project on someone's needles. Eventually you have closets full of yarn, a library of patterns, and bags, and bags, and bags of unfinished projects. And of course there's the unspoken guilt because there will never be enough time to knit it all.

In both situations, our hobby morphed into a chore because we've lost sight of the reason we started knitting in the first place. It's slow and helps us unwind. It's simple (just two sticks and a piece of string). It's satisfying to solve problems and create something beautiful and useful with our own two hands.