June 12, 2026

I’m Not Going To Tell You How To Get Your Knitting Mojo Back

There was a time when, for me, falling asleep meant planning knitting projects. Not in a formal sense. I was not sitting upright in bed with a notebook and a schematic. But somewhere between turning off the lamp and actually falling asleep, my brain would begin quietly arranging projects. Yarn substitutions. Sleeve lengths. What color would work with olive trousers. Whether I needed another cardigan. That part of my brain has gone strangely quiet lately.

I still love knitting. I still buy yarn, save patterns, and wander through Ravelry, Pinterest and Instagram looking for that familiar feeling, the little electric moment when a project suddenly attaches itself to you and becomes inevitable. But for the past several months, nothing has really landed.

And I think I finally understand why. I do not think I lost my knitting mojo first. I think I lost my sense of purpose for what I wanted to knit, and the mojo left shortly afterward.

This is not the same thing as “having enough sweaters,” although experienced knitters are often told some version of that story. Supposedly we all eventually evolve into serene wool minimalists who own six perfect handmade garments and spend the rest of our lives knitting dishcloths with spiritual clarity. That has not happened here.

I still love clothing. I still love style. I can see a beautiful coat or an elegant pair of shoes and immediately feel desire. The wanting itself is fully operational. What seems to have disappeared is knitting-specific wanting. Nothing is capturing my imagination strongly enough to justify spending sixty or eighty hours making it.

A loss of knitting mojo is often treated as a discipline problem. As though the solution is simply to cast on something, organize the stash, join a knit-along, or “just knit for fifteen minutes a day.” But I am not convinced knitting mojo lives in discipline. I think it lives in anticipation.

The real pleasure, at least for this garment knitter, begins long before the first stitch. It lives in imagining myself wearing the finished thing before it exists. In mentally building a future version of my wardrobe around it. In that delicious period where the garment is still perfect because it is still imaginary. Without that emotional attachment, projects can begin to feel oddly administrative.

Which may also explain why my current works in progress are failing to inspire me. They were not born from obsession. They were born from discomfort with not knitting. Emotional support stockinette. Placeholder projects.

I do not rely entirely on patterns to inspire me. I often design my own garments, or at least heavily modify what I knit. But even that process requires something to react to first. A silhouette. A proportion. A styling detail. A shape that makes you think, oh, that’s interesting. Lately, even fashion itself feels strangely flat to me. Not bad exactly. Just repetitive.

I am a person who still wants to knit. I miss the private companionship of it. The way projects used to follow me into sleep. The quiet excitement of imagining what I would make next.

I do not think this means I am done knitting. The fact that I miss the feeling so much probably argues otherwise. I think I am simply waiting to be captivated again.

For now, I am sitting with the discomfort of not wanting to cast on anything. Which feels strange after years of always having some project following me around mentally while I made coffee or folded laundry or tried to fall asleep.

It turns out there is a difference between having time to knit and having something you want to knit.

Find mojo inspiration here