Sunday, November 27, 2011

Mistakes I've made a few

In the arena of being a new knitter and not understanding how to properly match yarn and patterns I give you this story. You know how it is when you're new to anything, you don't know the rules, why the rules are there in the first place, or how and when to break the rules. 

There are some rules in knitting that I did not learn right away, cables show up best on light colored items, fuzzy yarn causes a halo effect so you lose stitch definition, and so on. I was making a pair of Fetching Mitts for my sister as a beginner and broke way too many rules. I blame ignorance.

Luckily I am a reasonably smart sister and realized when they were done that I had made a huge yarn choice mistake. So they became my practice mitts and I went back to the store and found some appropriate yarn to make a gift. Then my dog niece decided that one of the mitts should be dissected with her mouth and that was the end of that. Dog nieces what are you going to do? It is rumored that she really enjoyed taking the mitt apart.

Anyways I kept the practice mitts, let's call them the mistake mitts and used them from time to time myself. Last winter I realized they are the perfect transitional hand warmers for me. My issue? I made most of my mistakes on the first mitt and that was back when I would not rip anything back to fix it. I can not rip back do you know how long it took me? OK fine a couple of hours but that is the way I knit it that must be the way it remains. Who knew I could be so rigid?

Let me show you the problem. The mitt pulls away from my hand. 

The mistake riddled one

The reasonable one

Good - hugs my hand 

Bad - rolls away from my hand - cold

I could fit a car in there!


So now instead of just complaining about it, I vow to fix it! See the pile of yarn in the upper left corner? My weapon of change. The left mitt should look like the right mitt when I am done. Well except I have more cables on the left mitt, how did I make that mistake? Oh right new knitter!

And so I can report to you that the surgery was a success. I now have two reasonable mitts. One even has extra cables. Mistakes are not so bad, I like to think of them as learning experiences. 

3 comments:

  1. Adriene, I will tell you in another post, without pictures because I really wanted them to be fixed. And you know fools rush in.

    Fishes, I will make you another pair if you would like, we just need to figure out what will repel Molly.

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