sherriknits

Does this sound convincing?  I’ll try again.

i.AM.a.knitter

I really had a struggle with myself this evening.  Yesterday, as I said, I started the first square of The Great American Afghan.  I thought it looked a little wonky but I convinced myself to not make this a stressful project by letting myself do the perfectionist thing.  However, I still don’t like sloppy.

Today I had so many interruptions and I watched Lauri pass me up even though she started hers today.  That was not a big deal because I was busy and I won’t make this a contest.  (for myself)  I also heard from the Diplady that she had finished the inner part of the square and was doing the outer edge. 

My struggle didn’t come from these two knitters, it was my own frustration at myself.  When I got home tonight, I was finishing the second heart which made the inner part 2/3 done.  It became apparent to me that I had skipped a row on the first heart and that was why everything looked odd.  I decided to do the easy thing and rip back to that (after a little struggle with myself).  After attempting to fix it several times, I was thinking about the first row that I fudged a little bit on (and really, it was no big deal because there is a little bit of stitching over the top of that row), but I just wasn’t happy with it, so before I knew it, I had this:

Now, this has become an all too common sight for me.  At first I kind of laughed and then I started to struggle with whether I really am a knitter.  I know that I am capable of doing things, but I think my tendency is to not pay attention to what I am doing.  Once I start making mistakes, I start to lose confidence.

I really feel like I hit a crossroad at this point.  Am I going to continue or do I just face the fact that I am wasting my time.

Suddenly, something started rising up in me.  Am I going to let this defeat me, or am I going to press through and become the knitter I want to be?  This afghan is a great opportunity for learning many new techniques ~ but MUCH more than that, I had to ask myself if I was going to choose to be a quitter or was I going to reach  for an opportunity to improve. I have learned that in many ways, knitting parallels my life.  Will I choose to push through the hard things, the hurts, the struggles, the things I want to see myself do better, or will I just choose to accept defeat and think I am who I am and I can not change it. 

I choose to fight the fight. I will learn the discipline of working with care and I will not make it a legalistic venture by putting unnecessary expectation on myself.  I am human.  I love talking to people while I knit and sometimes this causes me to make mistakes…but I do know I am capable of tackling difficult projects and doing well at them.  All I need to do is do my best.

That said, here is my second attempt:

The lighting is never great at night, but at this point, I need a record of where I made it back to.  I am much happier with it because I found that by missing the row on the first one caused everything to be backwards and there was another mistake I had made that was a simple thing to correct once I actually *read* the pattern.  And this one just knit back up quickly.

I do have a few more things to show.

I have no idea how to get a good photo of a scarf.  The color showed up better in an earlier post but I just can’t get a better look at it.  I have worn it 2 days in a row and I who do not enjoy wearing scarves really like this one and don’t want to take it off.

I knit a very few rows on the Fly*dyed Ruby Redmond sock that I believe will be a Coriolis at this point.  It depends on how the yarn behaves.  I had it with me at Barnes and Noble last night and knit while I read. 

This is the whirlpool toe and I like what it is doing to the yarn.

I finally remembered to get a picture of our Saturday sky.

Rain.

Have a great weekend!  I’m going to go look at Ravelry before I get myself off to bed.

Tags: gaafghan, knitting, lessons learned, sky, socks

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