Seaming a Sweater: A lesson in slowing down

I have been interested in slow-fashion for a while now.  I mean, look at what I do with my free time!  I love knitting and sewing and making my own clothes and accessories.  I've been looking into the mending side of things and learning how to take care of my clothes for a longer period of time and make them last.  But something I don't have a lot of is patience.  I tend to make things as quickly as possible.  I am also a perfectionist so making them quickly while making them exactly how they are supposed to be has been a bit of a challenge.  Maybe that's why I have so many projects on hold?  Frustrated because they're not turning out exactly as I wanted?

Recently I finished a sweater that I have had on the needles for 2 years.  A sweater that should have been done a long time ago, but that I had put down because it wasn't turning out exactly as I thought it should.  

The sweater that I am referring to is the Baltica Cardigan by Alexis Winslow.  

This sweater is a bottom-up, seamed sweater that has a small texture detail that runs throughout the entire garment.  It's an intermediate level pattern, which shouldn't have been a problem for me because I consider myself at an intermediate level of knitting.  But I set it aside.  I set it aside because some of the numbers in the pattern weren't coming out exactly as they should have been.  I was one stitch off.  ONE STITCH!  

I contacted the designer and she recommended that I just continue with the pattern as it was written and not worry about the stitch.  She checked her math and said that it all checked out on her end and that I shouldn't worry about it too much. 

But because I was frustrated I set the project aside.

I finally picked it up again a few weeks ago because I wanted to clear some of my headspace and this project had been taking up a large chunk of it for far too long.  I've been on a cleaning/organizing/minimalist kick for a while now and the more I complete tasks and get rid of unnecessary junk, the more relaxed and free I feel.  Therefore, I knew I had to do something about this project.  So I finished it.  

I finished it for my mental health.  I finished it because it was a large task that needed to be done.  And I finished it because I genuinely wanted to wear it as soon as possible.  

I learned several things along the way, one of which was to slow down.  Now, I'd say that I finished this project fairly quickly compared to how long it had been taking me in the past.  I focused all of my knitting attention on it for two weeks.  

Some would say that I finished this rather quickly because of that.  And I did.  But I also had to slow down.  

I had to slow down when I was knitting the two fronts of the sweater.  

I had to slow down when I was blocking the sweater (pre-seaming) 

I had to slow down when I was weaving in the millions of ends on this sweater (an exaggeration, I know, but honestly weaving in ends takes a lot of time).

And I had to slow down when I was seaming the sweater.  

I wanted to get it done.  I wanted it to be finished.  So I worked diligently on the project.  I set deadlines for each of the steps, a sleeve in two days, a pocket in one, etc.  But I had to understand when I couldn't make those deadlines that I hadn't failed.  I didn't mess up and need to set it aside again.  I just had to slow down, re-evaluate, and move forward.  

I will say the longest part of this sweater is the seaming, and it's not that I did an outstanding job on it either.  But I took the time to make sure it was done correctly.  I made sure that I was sewing the pieces together so that they would stay intact for several years at least.  It took me an entire afternoon to do the shoulders and sleeves (with a few interruptions), and an entire evening to do the side seams.  And then I took part of another evening to do the pockets. 

There were definitely times when I wanted to stop, but I knew I couldn't.  There were times when I wanted to yell in frustration because I felt like it was taking forever, but I didn't.  I knew pretty early on into the seaming process that I was working on my patience with this project.  I was testing my limits and needed to challenge myself to grow a little.  

For other people, this might seem like a relatively insignificant thing.  

"Why were you so impatient with seaming a sweater?" They might say.

But I'm sure there are other knitters who will understand my plight.  Maybe that's why there are so many sweater patterns available to knit in-the-round now.  Maybe that's also why so many people prefer to knit top-down sweaters?  The process is faster and more streamlined.

I am grateful to my Baltica Cardigan for teaching me many things.  I learned patience while seaming, I learned how to let go of unnecessary details when some of the numbers didn't add up correctly for me, and I learned that in the end all of the "problems" that I seemingly couldn't get past at the very beginning of this project, didn't matter in the end.  Because what I ended up with, was a cardigan that I made with my own two hands, that I love, and that I will live in for years to come.