In 1994, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver published a seminal guide to writing called A Poetry Handbook. It’s a perfectly slender volume, and one of the best collections of advice for poets, aspiring or otherwise. The chapter on revision ends with this paragraph:

It is good also to remember that, now and again, it is simply best to throw a poem away. Some things are unfixable.

I’ve spent some time in this space talking about how the respective processes for writing and knitting are different, but the quote above illuminates one space they have in common. Observe:

This baby sweater was intended as a stash buster. Those two shades of blue looked fine together when I put the skeins side by side, and the beige didn’t disagree with them. Neither did the fourth color, which is happily absent from the above picture (I won’t even tell you what it was, to spare any possibility of torturing you). Even Z, whose color sensibilities are much more finely-grained than mine, thought they’d make a nice set.

Well, everyone was wrong. As soon as that sleeve seam was joined, I knew this sweater was an affront to all things knitted. There’s a fine line between “over the top” and “over the edge, ” and once I realized which side of the line this sweater was on, I stopped seaming. The remaining sleeve (light-blue and dark-blue, striped) and the other half of the front (beige, solid) have rejoined my yarn stash.  If knitting was a small western outpost, this sweater would be hung on a spike at the gate as a warning to all yarn criminals.

Not all is lost, though. Mary Oliver’s advice might seem harsh, but that’s only because she leaves it up to us to discover what happens when we have the fortitude to throw out the things that aren’t working: we make room for the things that do.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted pictures of anything I’ve knit. This isn’t because I haven’t been knitting, but because I’ve been too busy to take pictures, and just writing about things I’ve knit only goes so far. So, today, we catch up.

There’s already a picture of this drop-stitch scarf on my blog, but now it’s actually done. The person who is getting this scarf doesn’t have the slightest idea that s/he is getting it, and s/he might even be reading this very post! S/he is going to totally plotz when I hand it over. Anyway, faithful readers know that this scarf was knit with Tsuki from ArtFibers in San Francisco. Those of you who don’t have the fortune of living in the Bay Area can get the same results from Rowan Kidsilk Haze. But then you’d be knitting with Rowan, which is the knitting equivalent of paying rent in the Bay Area, so you might as well just move here.

Totoro is still waiting for his face, which means he’s waiting for me to knit a swatch of this yarn on which to practice my single-crochet embroidery. And while Totoro is waiting for his face, my niece Emily is waiting for her Totoro bonnet. I better hurry up. In the meantime, here’s a thank you to Hello Yarn for a great Totoro hat top-down bonnet in the form of an anime character. Freaking Disney copyright.

It’s really unusual for me to knit with the yarn that a pattern recommends, but I just finished a teaching a buttload of classes (knitting and writing), and some of my payment came in the form of methamphetamines yarn credit. “Backyard Leaves” from Scarf Style has been on my short list for a long time, so I was finally able to get the requisite skeins of Karabella Aurora 8. I loved knitting this pattern——challenging enough to keep me interested, but not so difficult that it drove me insane. Thank you, Annie Modesitt! “Backyard Leaves” is now wrapped around Z’s shoulders, which is one of my favorite places to put my knitting.

Here’s the other thing I’ve been doing. It’s right on my walk to work, three blocks from the 24th Street BART station. The next time you come visit San Francisco? F#%* Fisherman’s Wharf. Go to Philz.