Little Challenge, Great Results!
Do you know that feeling when you learn something new and you get a hang of it and suddenly you just can't let go? Or you are really having a hard time in your Math class and one day you just give it your all and you get something right? How about when you've been avoiding something because you actively lazy and one day when you give it a try, you realise you should've given it a shot long ago? Right, let's get into this.
My mom and my younger sister, Janet, would sometimes call me lazy. Maybe because I would just sit on the sofa with my legs in the air and watch when they moved the furniture around or I would just sit with a pot of food between my legs when they would be doing the laundry. Or sometimes when I would just sit and watch as my mom taught Janet how to knit and then show her how to sew designs onto sacks that would eventually be sold to tourists. That was me. On my lazy days.
I wasn't like that all the time, I had my 'active' days too and I hate sounding like I am always trying to justify myself but this is my honest truth. I might less slightly be in a position to help compared to my little sister, but that's only because I know she's around. However, there are days when she refuses to do anything (inactively) and I have to take up everything. Not that I'm always really mad about it because I get away with laziness more than she does.
Anyway, my mom tried to get me to knit ages ago but I never really learned. I just remembered that I had Home Ecology in grade 7 and the knitting chapter was the worst. I sucked at it. During the winter the girls would use lollipop sticks and some thread to knit little scarfs or just to show that they could knit, I was never one of them.
Recently I had to face the knitting culture when I came to Norway and I knew there was no running away from it because the folks up here knit like crazy. Of course not everybody does that, that's why you can make some good cash, when you sell it to other people. Some of my fellow students at Pasvik Folk High School knitted like crazy. They would knit socks, mittens, sweaters, baby clothes and hats with breath-taking designs. I loved watching them knit the days away and talk about it like it was the one thing that brought them closer, which it did.
After the whole thing with coronavirus and lockdown started, I decided to pay my knitting a visit. I was tired of always running away, scared as always. This time I owned up, decided to try something new, give it a shot.
So far I've knitted socks, two hats and mittens. This post, however, is about a hat I just finished a few days ago which happens to be a yellow beautiful hat that I fall in love with every single time I see it.
Aunt Iselin showed me two hats that she had knitted before and asked if I wanted to try something different or just knit the normal way. I was up for a challenge, and honestly it took me a couple of minutes to decide whether to give it a try or not, but eventually I made up my mind and that was it.
It was tough in the beginning, stressful too and each time I would say something like, "uhm aunt Iselin, kan du hjelpe meg igjen?", with a wide smile on my face. Each time aunt Iselin would smile and say, "det går bra, vi fikse det!".
At some point she would sit with my hat and correct some of the blunders I'd made, like losing masks or not putting them together properly or just not counting correctly. I got a D in Math!
Saturday night, about an hour before midnight, I finished the last parts of my phenomenal hat and as I did throughout the whole project, I just smiled and said:
Wow, I'm really impressed. This is amazing!
Aunt Iselin smiled too and I could tell that she was proud of me. Proud that I had tried so hard and gotten it done almost perfectly. One thing though, she said, was that I had to compliment myself about the little good things I did too. Not just acknowledge great leaps, because life is about small steps, each day. I know why she said that, I'm working towards that too<3
hearts, Queen
#blogging #knitting #norway #namibia #hobbies