Sock Yarn
Read Jeremiah 18:1-6
A few years ago I discovered some beautiful yarn for knitting socks. I discovered the yarns quite by accident while browsing in a marvelous store full of balls and skeins of yarn. To a knitter, walking through a yarn store is like entering a candy shop. Tucked in the back of the store were some bins of tiny balls of yarn. Picking one up I noticed that the individual strands of yarn would start out as one color, but somewhere along the same strand the yarn changed to another color. Each ball might contain three or four or more colors. It was amazing to see one strand of yarn changing colors several times. Trying to analyze it, my next thought was how the yarn could be dyed this way.
One of the salespeople noticed the gleam in my eye and how I picked up different colors. She stopped by and said, “Have you ever tried knitting with sock yarn before?” I hadn’t, so I asked, “How can I tell what it will look like when it’s knitted?” She explained that due to the changes in the colors along an individual strand it all depends on the size of the needles and the size of the project. It knits up differently depending on what you do with it. So I thought about it and then grabbed about six balls of yarn in different colors to take home and try.
Pulling the end of the yarn, I cast on 56 stitches onto size 1 double pointed needles. (Knitters will appreciate how tiny the needles are, and it takes four double pointed needles!) The yarn started out a pretty blue, so I knitted for several rows, and the yarn was still blue. Tugging a little more yarn, the strand of yarn turned orange. Wow! This is fun. I again knitted about six rows, round and round in a circle. The orange yarn kept coming, and I began thinking that orange wasn’t my favorite color. I wished there was more of the pretty blue. Suddenly the yarn changed to green, but I’d barely made it around once when the yarn changed again. What happened here? It’s all mixed up. One stitch was white, the next was grey, then white, and then grey…what was this? It seemed to go on forever. Oh, this wasn’t fun. What would this end up looking like in a sock? I wasn’t so sure about this. Maybe I shouldn’t have started this project. I hate to give up on anything, so I just kept knitting.
After about six or eight rows, I stopped and looked at what was happening. The small segments of white and grey looked like a mistake on the strand of yarn, but as I continued knitted round and round a pattern began to form. It looked like a checkerboard pattern! And then just like that, it stopped and I was back to the pretty blue color.
I find sock yarn fascinating. There was a show on TV recently about how the dyes are incorporated into the yarn. Dye was placed in a pattern on soft, creamy colored yarn. The dye was bright green and dark pink, but part of the yarn was left a soft cream color. Each time the newly dyed yarn was knitted, the pattern of the colors looked different in the finished project depending on what the knitter had done with it. Some projects had great big sections of one color, others had tiny bands of individual colors, and other projects created intricate patterns with all the colors.
Our lives are a like sock yarn. We’re going along with one band of color, when suddenly we’re switched to a block of color that we don’t like. Maybe there are bursts of color that are wonderful, but they are too short. Then there is the segment where things change after every stitch, but end up making a familiar pattern when finished. I think God gives me all the various colors along the strand of yarn of my life, and it’s up to me to make something out of it. I may not like the color or pattern right now, but I have to keep knitting and see what happens. I know it will change. I have to keep doing what I know how to do, follow the pattern, and I’ll be happy with the result at the end. All the changes along the way, the colors, the patterns, the stitches, contribute to the finished product. Just like sock yarn, what you do with your life will determine what it looks like as a finished project. Keep knitting!
Prayer:
Lord, Knit me in your image. Let me use all the colors and textures of my life to make an acceptable project for the good of your kingdom on earth. In Jesus name,
Amen
Libby Van de Putte
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