Exercising patience

Looking back now, I have been a knitter for eight years.  I learned how to knit when I was 20 years old, in my on-campus apartment junior year of undergrad.  One of my roommates taught me how to knit a garter stitch scarf.  That was all I knitted until 2008, when I finally learned how to purl and knit in the round and all sorts of other fancy tricks.  

I was definitely not the best student of knitting.  I decided (rather firmly, and like a lot of first-time knitters) that I was very much a scarf knitter, that I was happy doing that and nothing else (who the hell needs to learn how to purl anyway?) and I could live the rest of my life doing nothing but garter stitch. 

I was also ridiculously impatient.  It's a pattern that has been prevalent my entire life.  If I'm going to do something, I want to do it right, and I want to do it right the first time.  My first scarf was an agony of mistakes, simply because I tore it out about six or seven times in frustration before finally figuring out how to make the little loops stay on the needles and come out in some sort of pattern.  There were many projects that I abandoned, simply because I made a mistake somewhere, didn't realize it until about five or six rows later, and then gave up on it, because I didn't have the patience to "tink" (knit back) the rows to fix the mistake, and I knew I couldn't finish a project that had a huge glaring error in it.  If I did stick with the project, chances are I would rip the whole thing back to the beginning, preferring to start fresh rather than to tediously tink back until I got to the mistake, and fix it again.

In my rush to finish my Christmas knitting, I have been working on three projects at once, trying to get them all done in time for the holidays.  Last night, while knitting one (in the car on the way home from visiting my ILs), I realized that I had put a yarn-over (and thus, a lace hole) in the wrong place in the object I was knitting.  I stuffed it back into my bag and fumed the rest of the way home.  I was over halfway done with the object, but I had made the mistake five rows back.  I could take the object off the needles and rip back, but this often leads to dropped or twisted stitches.  The only smart thing to do was to sit there and slowly, tediously, tink the whole thing back.

It took me awhile, but I managed it.  I tinked back to the mistake, re-knit the stitches, and kept going.  It lost me an hour or two, but in the end, it will be worth it, and the gift will look so much better for having gone through the trouble of fixing the mistakes.  Apparently, I'm finally starting to learn some patience, to learn that it's better to correct than to give up and tear everything out.  It's worth far more to fix something than to give up.

Make of that what you will.