Spread Kindness: Unfinished Projects

Today, while cleaning up my office and craft space, I took a new approach to UFPs (Unfinished Projects). Nearly all artists and crafters have these art or craft ideas that sit unattended for months or years. Our nuggets of shame that we’ve left incomplete for…reasons. Perhaps we lost interest, maybe it wasn’t going the way we wanted it to, or life got busy, and we never went back to what we were working on. Often, in my case, I forgot I was even working on it.

These UFPs can pile up over time. Finding another one or examining a box of them can feel overwhelming. I know it’s a negative experience for me. I feel as though I’ll never have time to finish them, especially since I have so many projects on my mind. 

Today, I assessed my knitting UFPs. I split them into three categories:

1. The nearly complete projects that only require finishing (such as sewing, weaving in ends, and adding buttons, etc.)

2. The substantially completed projects that I have put so many hours into it would break my soul not to finish them.

3. The projects that were started but aren’t too far along and would take quite a while to finish.

It turns out that I don’t have any of the first category (that I’ve found yet). I intended to sit down and finish them all in one session. That way, I could finally enjoy the fruits of my labor. I have no doubt I will come across more than one of these as time goes by.

I have four of the second category that I still need to finish (who knows when). 

I have one infinity scarf that is almost complete, made from a cuddly soft alpaca yarn that I purchased from a farm I visited with friends. 

I have a shawl I began years ago, ran out of yarn, eventually found yarn I thought would complement it well, and worked on it for a time, only to put it down again. 

I have a bag I spent years of my life (exaggeration, it only felt like years) knitting in an overly tedious stitch, sewed a liner out of an old pair of jeans, and am halfway through putting the two together.

Lastly, a washcloth? Dishtowel? I don’t even remember what its purpose was or why it’s in two odd halves. I could decide whether to rip all of it out and make something new or to knit up the rest of the yarn and sew all of the pieces together into an odd towel. Time will tell.

Then, the third category. I had more of these than I would like to admit. All of them were made with “special” yarn. One-off skeins that I purchased because the colors were beautiful, the texture was luxurious, or they represented memories of a special place. It hurt my heart to see them in such an unloved state. 

I frogged every one of them and rewound their skeins. I was surprised at how much nicer it felt to see my favorite yarns wound, unused, but on display, than it was having them on needles of a partially started project. Not only that, but reducing the number of unfinished projects I had took some of that guilt and shame away. I feel refreshed and reinvigorated to finish what remains and begin something new.

It’s essential to be as kind to ourselves as we wish to be toward others. We can forgive our past selves the inattentiveness of unfinished things and give our present selves the space to begin something new. We can also choose to make time for things that we genuinely wish to have in our lives, and it will make them all the more special.