Knitting can be a wonderful way to connect with your values. I recently finished knitting the Bit by Bit Sweater (although I made mine into a dress) – by Danish designer Lӕrke Bagger, and was reflecting on why I love this project so much. I have made many beautiful sweaters with gorgeous yarn and wear them often, but there was something a bit special about this one, which I think boils down to the fact that it connects with so many of my values.
What are values?
We often speak about values in clinical psychology, particularly within the field of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), where they are defined as the principles that are most important to you in your life. The idea is that your values are like your guiding compass points, and that by identifying what is important to you, you will always know what you are navigating towards. They are different to goals because they can’t be completed, instead they inform how we act. We can connect with our values on a daily basis.
Throughout the many interviews I have conducted with knitters for the Why I Knit Podcast, I often return to the idea that one of the reasons that knitting is beneficial to our well-being is because it allows us a way to connect with our values on a daily basis.
How does my Bit by Bit dress help me to connect with my values?
Connecting with the value of mental well-being
As a psychologist (and a human), one of my core values is about the importance of mental well-being and doing whatever is necessary to restore or maintain this. The Bit By Bit dress is published in Lӕrke Bagger’s second book, ‘Knit it Out’ which centres on how she used knitting to understand and process grief following her father’s death. In this design specifically she speaks about gravitating towards the technique of entrelac, which is used in this pattern, in the days after her father’s death:
‘I took my knitting and decided to make something challenging. Not super challenging, just slightly challenging. I needed it. So I knitted a technique called entrelac. My body started to relax, my breathing grew calm, my belly grew softer. I didn’t really know where I was going with my knitting, I had no plan. I just knitted square after square. And I enjoyed it. I knitted out what I could not put into words. I was knitting my grief out of my body.’
So, for me personally, I love the idea that this technique has helped someone to cope with and process their grief, and that they have shared this with others who can also turn to it in times of need, or identify something else that will help them. It is a reminder that while knitting doesn’t make problems go away, it can be useful tool in tolerating the things we cannot change. It connects me with the most important value for me which is that we can use knitting to benefit our mental well-being.
Connecting with the value of process
The ethos of this design is on process rather than outcome. Both in her book, and subsequent knit-along, Lӕrke Bagger encourages knitters to focus on the process of knitting this project, rather than the end result. She advises choosing yarns that appeal to you, without thinking too much about what they might look like together. She encourages the knitter to accept that the end result might not look like the most beautiful sweater, and to lean into what colours and yarns they feel like using next.
I am a self-confessed Process Knitter, which for me doesn’t mean that I will knit anything at all, as long as I am knitting. Far from it! For me, being a process knitter means that most of the joy of being a knitter comes from the process, and that I think very carefully about what the process of a specific pattern involves so that it meets my specific needs. These needs don’t stay the same, and will vary depending on what else I am knitting at the time, or what else I have going on in my life. What it does mean is that I enjoy new, challenging and interesting techniques, particularly in a large project.
The Bit by Bit sweater particularly connected with the value of process for me, because it was using a technique that was new to me, and gave me a sense of challenge and achievement when I mastered it. It also involved different processes depending on whether the squares were leaning left or right, so this required concentration, and the squares were small, giving me frequent milestones to celebrate along the way.
Connecting with the value of adaptability
This was not a dress without its share of adversity! I had almost finished the back of the dress when I realised that about half way down I had made a pretty significant mistake in the entrelac, meaning that one of the sides had two extra squares, making the side bulge outwards. I went through the different options – leave it, unravel 60cm of knitting, surgery (at first I couldn’t even see which squares were wrong!), put it in the naughty corner and pretend it had never happened!
However after putting it down for a while, maybe even a whole week later I realised that I could actually figure out which sections needed removing and I made a plan for surgery, which was successful!
Here are some pictures of the surgical process:
This wasn’t actually the only challenge, the size of the sleeves turned out very far from what I had hoped, and I ended up making them longer and turning the rectangles sideways to create the size I wanted.
When the dress was eventually finished, I sent a picture to my mum and she said that she hoped I enjoyed wearing it despite the challenging journey I had been on with it. This really highlighted to me that I actually loved it more because it reminded me of my ability to problem-solve, be creative and overcome a problem by cutting into my knitting and grafting it back together.
As a psychologist I am always speaking to my clients about self-compassion when it comes to mistakes, as they happen to us all. However I do think there is something very powerful in the lived experience of making mistakes and overcoming them that you get from being a knitter. All the mistakes that happen in knitting are survivable, because knitting is a very low-stakes environment for practicing being a fallible human. So, another reason I love this dress is that it served as a way for me to connect the value of being imperfect, and being adaptable in the face of adversity.
Connecting with the value of creativity
I think this is the third sweater that I have made using leftover yarn, the others being my Shifty Sweater by Andrea Mowry and my Spot Sweater by Anne Ventzel (actually I also made one of those for my daughter). These have been some of my favourite projects to knit, and the reason for this wasn’t immediately apparent to me. While changing yarns in any pattern undoubtedly keeps my interest in a project, making the creative choices along the way definitely feels different to when the colour-changes are pre-determined by the pattern. It dawned on me that what these particular projects with leftover yarn have had in common is that I am constantly making decisions about the next colour to use and therefore connecting me with the value of creativity.
With the Bit-by-Bit sweater, the designer encourages you to think about what colour you feel like using, rather than focussing on how the yarns look together, which was also liberating and felt fun and creative in a different way, because I wasn’t sure how they would look together. It has highlighted to me that I experience an extra level of joy when I can connect to the value of creativity in my knitting project.
Connecting with the value of connection
This is a theme that comes up time and time again in my interviews for the Why I Knit Podcast, the idea of connecting to others, self, culture or tradition through knitting. For me, this project specifically allowed me to connect to my loved ones in the yarn choices I made. For the Bit by Bit knit-along, Lӕrke Bagger encouraged knitters to choose a yarn that reminded them of a loved one. This was something I decided to really lean in to, because I had so many yarns in my stash that were leftover from gifts I had made for family and friends. I chose some yarn that was part of a Christmas sweater I made for my mum, some from a sweater I made my husband, a scarf I made my best friend, and my children selected several of the yarns for me. I also used a yarn that my friend and colleague Paula had bought me on her travels in Scotland! I love that my dress now represents my connection to all of these special people in my life.
My Bit-by-bit sweater also allowed me to connect with a previous version of myself. In my 20’s, before having children or needing to wear ‘work clothes’ every day, I used to love wearing jumper dresses, so it was fun to revisit this part of myself.
Connecting with the value of sustainability
I am mindful that knitting isn’t a cheap pastime, and does involve creating new things and using new resources. While I always want to continue to knit for the process, I don’t always need new clothes, and I am mindful of only making things that I know that I will wear (or will be worn by whoever I gift them to). I don’t have a stash, (that’s a whole blog in itself!) but despite that, I have accumulated many lovely but often small leftovers of yarn, and I loved being able to create a whole new garment from these, which had the added bonus of being entirely free! So my Bit by Bit sweater dress also allowed me to connect with the value of making something sustainable with the things I already have.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can connect with your values through knitting check out our audio course, Self-Care One Stitch at a Time.