Focusing on the U.S. holiday today, I was also grafting the toe of a sock. I realized there were a few patriotic lessons from sock knitting that I could blog about.

Three Patriotic Lessons From Sock Knitting

1. United States of America – The first word is united. And lately, we’ve been anything but that. And like the grafting of a toe, it takes work. It’s not always perfect. And honestly there is no “perfect” when it comes to putting together two rows of live stitches, never mind uniting 50 States. But we still need to focus on it. Being United in any way we can needs to re-become a national priority.
2. Beauty of Imperfection – If I wanted “perfect” socks, I’d buy them. There’s something about a hand-knit or hand-cranked sock that is quite beautiful…BECAUSE of its imperfections. Celebrating our quirks, differences and even imperfections might go a long way toward healing in this country.
3. Perspective – Fixing Mistakes or Re-Knitting An Entire Sock – The sock below was made in an hour on my antique circular sock knitting machine. There were four mistakes (all four were dropped stitches). When I first started cranking socks, I’d get very frustrated with mistakes made by either the machine or me. But I realized that creating a really nice sock with four mistakes in an hour and then spending another hour fixing the mistakes and finishing the sock, was MUCH faster than hand-knitting the same sock. I’m all for fixing our mistakes. Taking stock of where we are now and working from there. Don’t sacrifice the flawed because it’s not perfect.

So for those of you in the United States of America, please focus on how to be more United. Focus on what will fix critical mistakes fastest. Personally, I’m focusing all my efforts these days on fixing the damage that’s happening to our democracy. It seems like the most critical thing. If we lose our basic democratic principles, even important issues, like civil rights, body autonomy and justice will be moot anyway.

Current Crochet/Knitting

First of all, I completely misoverestimated how much more crochet I needed to do to finish the April Showers Shawl.

Don’t get me wrong. I was distracted by a LOT of things this past weekend, including starting a machine sock.

But I will continue to work on the shawl, which I’m still enjoying a lot. And I will also start the second sock and hope that the second one takes even LESS than the total of two hours to make the above sock.

Hopefully you’ll take time to enjoy this week…whether or not you’re celebrating a holiday where you are.