A Stencil for My LIfe

My grandmother was not your typical grandmother when it came to crafty type things. She was not your average crazy knitting Grammy. Her craftiness manifested it self in quilts and embroidery. She was dangerous with a sewing machine and when I was growing up she was always embroidering things. There wasn't a piece of cloth in the house that didn't have some ornate pattern sewn into it's fibers. Her most prolific era was the 70's, and her talents lent themselves to the fashion of the day for sure. Adorning your garments with ridiculous sayings or cute little images was a sign of the times. A trend that I have seen come and go through the ages.

As a kid I would spend hours pouring through the endless coloring books she collected, looking for the perfect statement to shout from the bottoms of my bells. Once a design was decided upon, she would hand me tracing paper and a red fabric transfer pencil. I would follow every line with careful consideration and diligence. Once the stencil was finished, she would fire up the iron and apply the design to the chosen fabric. With serious precision, she would guide the fabric skillfully under the needle following the red markings. This helped insure a garment I would be proud to sport on the playground the next day. But she also did here share of free handing it, and the results were, shall we say, hit or miss. One little slip and she would have to start all over.

Now, my grandmother had 8 children and so everything was saved or fixed and never thrown away. I remember the times she would make mistakes and have to start over. It wasn't very labor intensive to get the design made because she was using a machine. However, It was undoing it that was a serious pain. Wasting not and wanting not, she would go through the arduous task of pulling the thread from the fabric with a small tool that resembled something you would use to separate a crab from it's tasty meat. Man what a pain! But Knitting, as I observed last night, is the complete opposite.

So I may not have grown up with the typical knitting granny, but my 17 year old daughter has filled that void in my life in spades. She is what I like to refer to as a serious knit wit. Ever sense she learned how to knit one hurl two at the tender age of 7, she has had at least 3 or 4 projects in various states of completion. In addition to the multiple projects scattered about her room, and the house, there are piles of yarn in a variety of colors and weights. I have also jabbed myself more than twice when sitting on the couch. Completely unaware of the massive metal needles waiting in the cushions to pierce a new hold in my ass.

Like most new things a person tries to learn, her projects in the beginning were in need of some serious polish. But with a damn near obsessive passion for tacky yarn and fashion that keeps you warm, she has blossomed into quite the artist. Her medium...fuzzy string. Over the years it has been quite impressive to watch her knitting skills flourish. I mean, this kid could knit you a new house key, that worked, if you asked her too. Every spare moment of her life is spent with needles crossed and yarn at the ready. She has even knitted, what looks like a paper grocery bag, out of strips of recycled plastic grocery bags. Totally insane!

What is even more insane is the intensity of the labor involved in this process. She tried to teach me once, but my patients for it eluded me so completely, that I never made it past the first row. She on the other hand can sit and watch TV while knitting away only looking down every so often to make sure things are straight and checking to make sure she isn't running out of yarn. Complete autopilot at times. Most of the time things turn out smashingly. Other times, her zombie like unconsciousness, has caused her to destroy countless hours of effort.

Last night while the wife and I our weekly dose of the Biggest Loser, our daughter sat between us on the couch knitting a hat for a friend. It looked pretty intense. The patterns she had created with the yarn were intracit to say the least. It looked like the damned thing was almost near completion, when all of the sudden she started to pull it apart, destroying what looke to me to be hours worth of work! When I asked her why she was doing that, she said that she wasn't paying attention and made it the wrong size. Both my wife and I shook our heads in frustration. This wasn't the first time she has done this. It seems that just about every project she starts gets reincarnated a few time before she is happy with it. This I am sure can be traced to the fact that she never follows a pattern or a plan.

Early on in her knitting career, she refused to read a book or consult a mentor for ideas. I would see her travail on a project and get half way through it only to grab the ends and tug the offending project into oblivion! All that work gone all because she was too hard headed to have a plan of attack. While my grandma's embroidery mistakes were easy to create and difficult to undo, my daughters knitting mistakes are the opposit. Difficult to create and easily undone. All she has to do is yank on the end and away it goes. Just to up the drama factor, sometimes  she will tie one end to the dogs collar and make him go fetch something clear at the other end of the house. It Makes the process of extricating the mistake more of a spectacle for sure.

Believe me, I get the need to just have the freedom to create with no preconceived notion or ideas. Life would really suck if everything was planned out and sectioned off into neat tidy piles of instructions to follow. But when it comes to creating something as labor intensive as knitting a sweater or embroidering a masterpiece, it doesn't seem to me that free handing is the way to go about it.

The same could be said for getting healthy and losing weight. I must admit, there have been times in this process of getting healthy that I have certainly been guilty of winging it. In the beginning it was pretty easy to lose weight. All it took was an increase in movement and a decrease in calories. The weight kinda just dripped off as long as I ate cleanly and stuck to those two basic ideas. But much like the stencils my grandmother followed, I am finding it a necessity to get a dietary and excercise plan of attack in place now. My body has gotten used to what I am doing and need a regiment to get that fat burning furnace back on line. I am at a point where I need to snap out of the auto pilot mind set and look down at my work to make sure my pattern is going in the right direction. Otherwise all my hard work up to this point may get unraveled from lack of progress and frustration. Two things that have caused my progress to get pulled apart in the past.

So until I have become so completely proficient in this disicpline of good health, a plan will be important to help me move forward. I'm sure eventually it will become second nature to me. So much so to the point of zombie like unconsciousness I'm sure. But until that day comes, I will have to use a stencil. Guess it's time to bust out the coloring books.