There is a particular kind of guilt that belongs to knitters.
It lives in the project bag holding the sweater you haven’t touched in six months. It hides in the sock that has been waiting for its second mate since spring. It lurks in the yarn you bought for a project that seemed absolutely essential at the time but now inspires approximately zero enthusiasm.
We call these projects UFOs, or unfinished objects, and we talk about them as though they are evidence of some personal failing.
But what if we stopped looking at them that way?
What if an unfinished knitting project isn’t necessarily a mistake, a waste or a promise we’ve broken? What if it’s simply a record of who we were when we cast on?