You know what makes one a better knitter? Knitting. Yup, all that nagging your mom did to get you to practice your piano back in the day applies to knitting, too. Who knew?
I have been knitting long enough -- 40 years, you'd think I'd be better by now -- that I feel like I can read my stitches pretty well. Heck, my second sweater, back in 1968-9, was an cabled fisherman knit, and I was able to lay the pattern aside after a few inches. Pats self on back. My one venture into lace didn't go so well, but I blame it on the Kid Silk Haze. Yeah, that's the ticket -- it was the yarn's fault.
But this double knitting stuff, it's a whole new ballgame for me. I had to knit blindly, as in "count and trust providence that it works" for the first 6" or so; then I began to see what it *should* look like, although that was no reason to stop counting. Don't ask, trust me on this one. Eventually, after a couple feet of scarf had come to pass, I found I could tell by the feel of the stitches on the needle as I came to knit them whenever I had screwed up a stitch on the previous row and needed to fix it. Usually the problem was that I hadn't managed to draw the yarn through the old stitch, and so had a slipped stitch and a yarnover instead of a new stitch. Easy enough to fix on the needles without tinking back. Um, yeah. See below.
One of my accomplishments over the past year is that I seldom need to use a crochet hook to fix a dropped or screwed up stitch, no matter how many rows ago it happened. Self-administer another pat on back. Of course, it helps that I never knit anything tougher than stockinette or garter stitch, but still. I feel quite proud of myself when I fix an error that happened several inches ago by dropping the column of stitches back and picking them up correctly with the needle tips.
Which brings me back to my double knitting. I just found a dropped stitch that happened several rows ago. Or, more likely, it happened on the last row but dropped back several more rows as I finished that row and began the next. Anyway. I had to go find a crochet hook to fix this one, all of which gave me an excuse to pat myself on the back Gee, Kath, isn't your shoulder getting sore from all this self-congratulation? because it was the first time I'd needed a crochet hook in several weeks.
Now, none of this is to say that the scarf is perfect. Let's play find the wonky stitch, shall we?
There are also a several spots where the fabric, which should be a flattened tube attached to itself only at the sides and the bottom, is mysteriously attached to the other side somewhere in the middle of a row. Did I drop back and fix those? Obviously not. It doesn't affect the look or the utility of the scarf so I just noted the mistake, reminded myself how important it is to pay attention, and moved on. I have since figured out that these attachments occur when I'm supposedly fixing one of those slipped-stitch-yarn-over problems; apparently I have sometimes drawn the yarnover through the front stitch when it should have been the back stitch or vice versa. Live and learn. And if I live long enough, I should learn.
Oh, here's another little gem I found last night.
Who put this l-o-n-g loop of yarn in the middle of a perfectly innocent row? It certainly wasn't me, I'm too good a knitter. Yeah, right.
All this is to say that I'm feeling pretty good about both my knitting abilities and my attitude toward my knitting. Like many folks, I have a streak of perfectionism that, unrestrained, would prevent me from ever finishing anything. A workplace personality exercise a number of years revealed to me that I have a hard time letting go of a project. I just want to keep fixing it and improving it far past the point of good sense. Used correctly, this trait means that I can bring a project to a better final product than someone without it; used incorrectly, like I said, it means I never finish anything.
In relation to knitting, I'm happy that my perfectionism doesn't get in the way. If a mistake is relatively unobtrusive and relatively easy to fix, I'll fix it. If it is obtrusive, I'll ponder long and hard about just how obtrusive it really is. We all know exactly what that is like. I truly admire the work of people like [you know who they are] whose knitting objects are so beautiful because, among other factors, they must fix a mistake, any mistake. But I am happy for myself that I'm not one of them. I'll never be a knitter-for-hire, but that's okay.
In the meantime, I have my slightly-more-than-half-done scarf. Which my husband looked at today and said, "Who is that for? It's pretty."
Yay, me.
