I SAW A SHAWL! {a digital short story, illustrated by C. Svellinger}

***I drove myself to the doctor this morning, with my kids, and got a positive for strep throat. The boys had no idea what was going on and kept asking me “Mom, who is sick?” So that’s fun. I wrote this post out over the weekend, enjoy.***

If you’re not the creative sort, it’s okay because in truth, I am not the creative sort. Ideas don’t come to me easy. I always fall back on using obnoxiously cliche things to practice drawing or lettering.

I bounce around to other projects during my times of creative stagnation. I do a lot of knitting or crocheting because it’s easy, it gives my hands something to do instead of sitting there going “What should I draw?”.  I’m supposed to say I give my hands work by folding laundry and washing dishes, or cleaning my husband’s beard trimmings from around the bathroom sink, but for some reason, I’m still immature and all that rot.

Creating relieves stress, cleaning piles it on.  Creating is a stolen sanctuary in a busy day, cleaning is the Barney song that never ends. The purple dinosaur, Barney. …I actually just drew a complete blank on what the Barney song sounds like because I’m delirious and have strep throat. Help. -No, wait. Don’t help, I don’t want to know, because tomorrow, now that I’ve written this, I’ll be going about, wincing as I swallow with my enormous, sick tonsils, scrubbing the dishes, and I’ll think of this paragraph and if you’ve helped me remember the song, then it’ll get going in my head and I’m already cleaning, and cleaning IS the never ending Barney song, and on top of that I’m sick, so it’s Hell thrice over! NO!

ANYWAY. I started knitting my first shawl in December.  Picking a variegated color palette always results in decorative war and tragedy, so I chose a safe, slightly heathered, Thicket Green.

It occurred to me sometime around Christmas that I’d never raked Instagram to find fellow knitters for inspiration.  Lo and behold, there is quite a posse there, and little did I know there exists some very cool yarn makers who sell the loveliest yarns, in the loveliest colors. And then, a small creative inkling hit me, and I went back to my drawing board. Literally. And digitally.

I now present my first digital illustration/story:

*****

 I SAW A SHAWL. 

By C. Svellinger

*****

As you know, I started my shawl. But here’s what you might not know so much about my personality. When I have something I want to do for the first time, I Pinterest, and Google, and YouTube, and Skillshare that thing to find out every way it can be made.  I go ahead and learn how to top-down knit a shawl just in case I decide that’s how I want to do it so that I’m already familiar with it when I actually begin. But I decide against it. I screenshot colors and toss them together in a random app to see how they look laying together and I confirm that still, no, I am not good at making colors friends, even though that group seemed like it should make total sense! And then, sometimes I get sidetracked and learn how to knit socks because after this I want to learn to knit socks and it helps if I’m already a little familiar with the process.

Yeah, she’s a funny bird.

So, there I am, after my extensive shawl recon,  beginning to knit with cozy thoughts of wrapping myself in this carefully planned masterpiece during these cold months. Basically, it was going to be my adult lovey. I chose what I thought was a lovely deep green, fingering weight, Pima cotton yarn. Like, boy, hi. This was gonna be the best little thing ever.
That’s when I got on Instagram to look for inspiration.

And I realized there’s this, like, wave of trendy knitters. Which is very cool. Truly it is! Like: you, also, like to sit and let your anxieties flush out of you in repetitive finger movements, to the small clicking of two needles, mostly in silence? YES. Come. Let us sit in the same room and not really talk much, and we can knit our lovies and we can be friends, and sit separately in our coziness.

So that’s a fun discovery. But then I saw it.  Down the cushy hole of the Instagram knitting thread, I SAW A SHAWL: the one I would have picked to make, had I seen it 200 rows ago. T’was a goddess of a shawl, and beams shot out from its stitches, and its asymmetrical elegance gave a lofty hair-tossing when it caught my eye.

It was VERY MUCH cooler than my poopy thicket green shawl I’d been garter-knitting my brains off. I looked at my work and now, it felt like I was making something a peasant would only begrudgingly choose from the basket’s bottom when all the other shawls were taken.
BUT WHATEVER. IT’S FINE.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last 10 years that I would go back and tell my ridiculous 22 year old self, it is this:

Follow through. Finish it. You’ll only regret the unfinished.

Don’t wait for it to be perfect before you start because it never will be, and then you never will, and then you’ll be standing there 10 years later wondering WHAT in the world you were actually fussing over that kept you from just finishing it. Stop over analyzing and trying to learn all the things before picking the most rational route, just start, and then, DO THE TASK AT HAND.

So in my case, in this instance, I MUST. FINISH. my Thicket Green shawl, and I will love it because I’ll actually have something to show for it.

Plus, I paid $40 for the yarn.

:)

Goddess shawl, I see you, and one day, I’ll try my hand at you. But not this day, lass.

I don’t know where that turned Irish, but there it is. Bye.

**PS. If you’re interested, the goddess shawl is actually called the Find Your Fade Shawl by Andrea Mowry.  Here’s her pattern on Ravelry: http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/find-your-fade It’s so lovely!