Beginnings Start With Endings

Happy New Year, friends! I hope 2013 is off to a good start for you and your holidays were lovely! 

On Saturday, December 29th, one of my dearest, longtime best friends G & I had our annual Christmas visit. I look forward to this every year! We exchanged gifts and along with a novel called The Language Of Flowers, she gave me two skeins of drool worthy yarn in brilliant shades of pink & green. I later set those skeins in my knitting basket and decided it was time to finishing an unfinished knitting project before I would even contemplate what to do with them.

That unfinished knitting was a piece I started back in 2010, sometime after I got home from the hospital in July to begin a very long road of recovery after a near-fatal infection damaged my muscle tissue, memory, heart function and put my left kidney in jeopardy. I was on bed rest for over three months, and in such emotional shock, I could barely do more than watch television most of the time.

Around the time I started slowly re-reading a favorite memoir, A Year By The Sea by Joan Anderson, I started knitting just to knit, for the comfort of repetition. Coincidentally or not, I picked this gorgeous, wool yarn from my stash, which reminds me of the beach: pink sunsets, sand & shells. My 'beach shell yarn' as I've always called it. Wool gives me a rash and I knew from the moment I touched this yarn when I found it (and a few other colors) on clearance, I'd never be able to wear it, but it was too pretty to pass up!

I knew one day it would be my "knitting is my yoga" yarn. My "my brain cannot handle doing anything else" yarn. And that it was during late 2010.

I can't remember why I didn't finish knitting out the skein, but I left it, unfinished on the needles, wrapped up and sitting on the back shelf of my nightstand. Why did I leave it all this time where I could see it? Why didn't I put it away? "Out of sight, out of mind." I don't know.

I do know that the beautiful gift of yarn from G, for whatever reason, compelled me to finish knitting out the beach shell yarn. I was finally ready to finish it and move forward. New Year's Day evening, I picked up where I left off and last night, I finished it!

One day, when I knit out the other equally gorgeous, albeit itchy skeins, I'll sew them together for a pillow.

I've already picked up another unfinished knitting project, a scarf in a soft, fluffy yarn the color of strawberry ice cream (not pictured). I'm feeling... Lighter. And, while others may already realize this, I'm coming to know that beginnings start with endings, but in a different way than I've known it before.  (If that makes any sense).

How does completing those unfinished projects of yours make you feel? What could you reasonably do to finish one of them this month?

Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®