Palpitation
This was the very first bit of tiny nonsense I ever knit.
I was having a bad time. I’d broken my leg. I couldn’t get comfortable to knit for more than twenty minutes at a time. Everything felt absolutely impossible. So I knit these. I knit piles and piles and piles of these sweet, silly little distractions.
I almost didn’t write a pattern because I truly wasn’t sure anyone needed any such thing. But when I shared a few pictures, folks were absolutely besotted. So I wrote them up, and they’ve been one of my most popular patterns ever since. I am truly delighted that you love them as much as I do!
They’ve shown up as decorations or favors at weddings and baby showers and birthday parties. They’ve been tucked in lunch boxes and book bags and coat pockets on both hard days and happy ones. They’ve found their way into envelopes and through the mail to folks who needed a little surprise. They’ve shown up on Christmas trees and garlands and mobiles. They’re basically the perfect way to turn a few dozen yards of yarn and a few hours of knitting into a tiny token of good will that you can hand out as needed.
Dispatch
There’s something magical about letters. I don’t know why. I’m not in charge of these things. There just is. The idea taking a tiny handful of the thoughts swirling around in your head, turning them on to words, putting those words on paper, and sending them off on an adventure to land on someone else’s doorstep and brighten their day is just kind of special.
My hope is to capture a tiny sliver of that magic with this knitted envelope!
Discretion dictates you not actually try and send it through the mail (though goodness knows I understand the temptation). But you can absolutely tuck a note (or a gift card, or some candy, or some other tiny treasure) inside and slip it under your sweetheart’s pillow or into a friend’s coat pocket or into your kid’s lunch box. Or perhaps you want to help the tooth fairy on her appointed rounds or make a post office play set (how cute would it be to make a little snap on stamp?) or knit a whole bunch and have the coolest advent calendar ever. I suspect that, as with most magical things, something delightful will occur to you if you just think about it for a little while!
Preserves
Look, I cannot explain the appeal. Either you look at these, struggle to contain a tiny gasp of delight, and run to your scraps bin to find the perfect strawberry colors. Or you...don't. And I get it! They will not be everyone's cup of tea!
But if you have my kind of brain, the kind of brain that often finds itself going "hmm, I wonder what would happen if..." and then you give it a try and then a few hours later you're holding a tiny little treasure in your hands and marveling at what you made, then I think you might absolutely adore these. I know I do!
Plus they'll never, ever, ever go furry in the back of your refrigerator (admittedly, more likely to happen to spinach than to strawberries, but somehow I still mess that up sometimes). Maybe if I make enough of them, I'll earn amnesty for whatever horror show is happening in my produce drawer right now. Or maybe, just maybe, they'll inspire me to make something delicious the next time the berries look good at the market.
Fangs
Do you need these? No. No, you absolutely do not.
Do you want them? I suspect some of you do. Now of course some of you are far more sensible and reasonable and restrained and mature than I am. If that’s you, then of course you won’t want them. But some of you share both my unspeakable fondness for bats and my complete inability to ignore anything that passes a certain cuteness threshold. And if that’s you, well, here you go!
They’re astonishingly quick (each one took me less than two hours to knit), they’re perfect for scrap yarn (sock scraps are especially good for these), and I highly recommend you knit a whole colony of them (because you’re going to want to play with all the different wing shapes).
Peached
These? These actually came into being in the fall of 2019 when the (cough, first, cough) impeachment of everyone’s least favorite felon was underway, and I felt the need for something soft that I could squeeze. Or throw against a wall. Or stab full of pins. The intervening years have brought no end of things to be mad about, and the current round of elections has brought even more.
And sometimes that rage turns into stitches. And calls to your representatives. And donations to abortion funds. And reminders to your friends and family to check on their voter registration. And attendance at your local school board meetings. And all those other things that feel tiny and insignificant on their own, but that add up when you do them over and over and over again. Rather like stitches.
And yes, yes of course, you can absolutely make these just because they’re cute and you want a perfect little peach (or apple) for some completely non-ragey reason. And I could write something here that extols their virtues and makes you want to knit them. Maybe that’s even what I should do.
But what I’m going to do is remind you that good things can happen when you turn your rage into action. Because right now, I think we all need that more than we need someone waxing poetic about a knitted peach. So figure out what you’re mad about, and find one tiny thing to do about it. You’ll feel better after. Because you’re a knitter, and knitters know that tiny things, done over and over, add up to something big.
Drifts
Did I wake up one day, smack dab in the middle of a wide variety of crises, both deeply personal and more general in nature, and find myself absolutely possessed with the inescapable urge to knit a pile of snowballs? Why yes, yes I did.
Did I take myself directly to the store, bright and early that very morning, to purchase a variety of spheres and set to work satiating this urge? Also yes. With absolutely record speed.
Was I surprised when it turned out that quite a few of you also felt the need make a selection of your own projectiles to mitigate whatever personal horrors are plaguing you at the moment? I mean honestly, at this point, no.
For you see, at this point I trust that a fair number of you are either feeling the same rage I am or dealing with the same heartbreaks or just needing the same distractions. I knew many of you would love them, and some of you would find comfort and beauty in them, and maybe just maybe a few of you would throw them just as hard as you could against the nearest wall when you needed to vent a little steam. Or you could just hang them on your christmas tree. That’s totally ok too!
Whatever you decide to do with them, I hope they bring your hands and your heart and your head a little moment of calm and remind you that you can make beautiful things, even when the world feels like it’s on fire.
Deviltry
You don’t need these. You really don’t. Some of you may even be scandalized by them (which really, if this is what you can muster the energy to be scandalized by given the state of the world, well then I admire your equanimity in the face of actual catastrophes). But I know, in my heart of hearts, that there are some of you who will have you day made better by these little dudes. That, or you’ll use them to make someone else’s day better, and that’s just as good.
Because the world is on fire. And it feels like the bad guys are winning. And we’re all exhausted and terrified and overwhelmed. And that’s not going to stop any time soon.
But when it feels like that, there’s something powerful in putting down your phone, picking up your needles, and making some absurd little thing that brings you joy or making something you know will make someone else smile. No it’s not practical. No it’s not necessary. But making a little bit of time to do something joyful is surprisingly powerful. And I want you to know exactly how powerful you are.
Glowing
If you looked at these and though "ooooh, I wanna color them" you're not alone! I've made a little coloring book with images of a couple of my favorites. It's free, and you can download it over here! And if you're worried they're hard, I've got a little free download over here with some sample folds so you can try it out ahead of time to make sure you can do it.
Every year, right about when the time changes and the sun starts setting well before dinnertime, I am overcome with the urge to make these. I fold them by the dozen and absolutely fill my windows. I can't explain it. I can't justify it. I have absolutely no idea how something made from nothing more than a few sheets of paper and a couple of stickers can be so utterly enchanting. But somehow they are.
They satisfy my brain in much the same way as knitting. You use simple materials (yarn, or paper), and a tiny handful of fundamental techniques (knit & purl stitches, or straight & diagonal folds), and repeat the same actions over and over (stitch after stitch after stitch, or fold after fold after fold). And somehow you end up with something that feels like so much more than the sum of its parts.
They've been a touchstone of my year for longer than I can remember (the family lore is that they were one of the holiday crafts the nuns at my German kindergarten taught me to make). They make even the darkest winter days seem just a bit brighter and more bearable. And, while I certainly don't have the commanding presence of an elderly German nun, I absolutely love the idea of sharing them with all of you.
I hope they bring you a little light when the world feels dark!
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