Metaphor

After a bit of a hiatus in favour of a sofa throw for the boyfriend's new house, I've picked up the little tiny fox feet again. (Not that the sofa throw is in any way finished, you understand, but it's big wool on big needles with a pretty but fairly mindless pattern, and I missed the intricacies of the fox feet.) Picking it up again after several weeks away, I've been reminded of the experience of knitting the very first repeat of the pattern, when I had no idea what I was doing and how it was going to work. Because this pattern gets ugly. If you click on the link and look at the photo, you can see how it knots itself up into lumps. At this stage in the repeat, there's none of the 'give' that you normally get in knitting. It's tight and lumpy and makes your hands ache after half a row. And when I first saw it looking like that, it was a real leap of faith to keep going. I thought maybe, best case scenario, it would eventually be fine after some serious blocking. Worst case scenario? Maybe I was using the wrong size needles. Maybe my tension was completely off. Maybe I was just going to end up with a colourful disaster of knotted string. But for some reason (sheer stubbornness?) keep going I did, and... well, you've seen how it turned out. Today it struck me as a good metaphor for life. Sometimes it gets ugly. Sometimes you just have to keep knitting.