Growing Up is Hard to Do

I've only been knitting for five months, but I feel like I have been doing this for years. My knitting skills are much more advanced than they were even 3 months ago. I try to view every new project as an opportunity to learn. No other project as helped me grow as a knitter as much as my current one. Let me start off by saying that when I first found this project the pattern said it was "designed for the discriminating knitter". Which I took as, "This is not your average blanket so be ready to put some work into it." Since I learned early on to practice new patterns in my gauge square (avoiding mistakes in the actual projects), I was up for the challenge.

It seemed easy enough for me. the pattern consists of cabling and lace. I've done cabling no problem, it was the lace that terrified me a bit. So I decided to practice it before I started. After about 4 tries, I felt I had learned to do the lace portion of the pattern just fine. I decided to go ahead and cast on. About 16 rows into the pattern, I stopped and realized I had messed up. A lot. So I cried in frustration for about thirty seconds, and frogged it. I started over again, and caught myself making the same mistakes, but this time I realized it much sooner and took a deep breath and unknitted back to the point of my mistake. Pretty soon, I was getting the hang of it. Then I suddenly realized how I would keep making the same mistakes. By this point my head was pretty clear and I decided to try to come up with a better solution rather than give myself a few seconds of deep breathing before tinking back. My biggest problem is that I would keep forgetting yarn overs.

Let me stop for a second to explain WHY this is such a big deal. When it comes to a row with yarn overs I make about thirty. Missing just ONE would be very noticable. The only thing is, its hard to notice you missed one until you get to the next row.

Fortunately for me, I discovered that I could easily pick up some yarn from the previous row and mock a yarn over, and it really doesn't look that different! I stood up and did a booty dance. Okay not literally, my family would laugh at me, but in my head I was doing it. 

I'd like to say that it was smooth sailing, but sadly, it wasn't. No one is perfect, especially not me. As much as I try to pay attention and count everything, I still mess up. Sometimes I forget to change up my pattern, other times I accidentally drop a bunch of stitches. The only difference is that now I know how to fix my mistakes with grace and you can't even tell. I wouldn't call myself a stitch "Doctor" just yet, but I have definitely progressed to stitch "Nurse."