Why I Stopped Feeling Guilty About Unfinished Knitting Projects

For many of us knitters, it’s common to have several projects on the go at one time. Occasionally, that can result in some projects taking much longer to finish than we had anticipated or would prefer.

I used to feel really guilty about that. I told myself it was wasteful or lazy to have a bunch of unfinished projects in my pile of craft gear.

Nowadays, I feel differently. A knitting project that lingers isn’t a failure. There might be all sorts of perfectly good reasons why it’s taking a while. Here are just a few of them.

Sometimes Projects Just Take Time

There are some knitting projects that are really large undertakings, and no matter how intensely you focus on them, they’re not going to be finished quickly. My favorite example of this, of course, is the Mitered Square Blanket of Doom. That thing took me three years of on-and-off knitting, and it could have easily lingered even longer if I had let it.

The thing is, it was such a big project that I really needed to take breaks from it for my own sanity. If I had kept working on it straight through, it would have burned me out and probably given some some repetitive stress injuries to my wrists.

If you are also working on a really big project, taking breaks from it now and then might be an important part of the process. It’s like training for a marathon. You need your rest days.

Or, in my case, rest months.

Different Projects Fulfill Different Needs

I always have several projects on the go partly because I need different projects for different moods and different scenarios.

When my brain is really fresh and I have no distractions, I’m happy to work on something more complicated. If I’m tired, I need something simpler. On days when I’m traveling, I like something small, like a pair of socks or fingerless mints. If I’m knitting in the dark, I need something that’s entirely stockinette, like a Musselburgh hat.

That means that I trade off between the projects, and depending on what my life looks like, the right circumstances for certain types of projects may come up less frequently. That’s okay. It just means that I’m going to get more opportunities to work on some types of projects than other type of projects, and that latter category will just take longer to finish. No big deal.

Variety is the Spice of Life

Sometimes, there’s nothing wrong with the other projects I’m working on, and I just need to do something different.

It’s like when you’ve been getting coffee at your regular spot for ages, and one day, you just decide to try something new. That’s not a criticism of the usual spot. It’s just a normal human interest in novelty.

And in the end, we almost always end up coming back around to the regular spot after we’ve tried some other things. The same is true with our knitting projects. We’ll come back to finish them.

Avoiding the Project Might be Telling You Something

Finally, if a project has been lingering for years and you just can’t bring yourself to come back to it, it could be that the avoidance itself is telling you something.

It could be you just don’t enjoy the project. Maybe it’s not something you can envision yourself using in the future. Perhaps it’s just too far beyond your current skill set.

Whatever the reason, it’s perfectly okay to decide after a while that a project just doesn’t suit your current needs. You can frog it and make something else with the yarn.

If you’ve been feeling guilty about any unfinished, lingering projects in your knitting pile, I hope this helps alleviate some of that guilt. It’s perfectly normal and totally fine to have some projects you haven’t finished yet and aren’t quite sure when you’re going to finish them. Take your time and enjoy the process, whatever that might look like for you.