What you get from sock class

I sat in on a toe up sock class last night. Learned a bunch of new things. Met a very wise knitter. Or 3.

I'm still mired in secret projects. If these were not secret projects I would have taken a whole lot of photos, because there has been a lot to see. Along the way through these projects, I have learned so much.

On part one, I knit and re knit rows, I sweated and slaved. Every error took days, nay weeks to get past. Counting to 2 became the most painful thing in my days. And yet here I am, just a little farther into project, and I cannot believe what I am doing.

I have come to know the flow of the pattern well enough that I am following along not needing to read the pattern a lot. I know how many stitches there are to get to any point and more often than not, they are being counted and tracked as I work through the stitch rows. Yesterday afternoon, I suddenly realized that where I should have 3 plain stockinette stitches there were 4. I also realized that the last section of the set was one stitch short. The row below that had one too many and one too few. The row below that, had one too many and one too few. It was not looking good. I'm working with a doubled strand of very fine black laceweight yarn that is a pleasure to work with but is in league with the devil should you try to tink back or rip. I did think about drinking, but I was still planning to go out to that sock class, so I went out to sit in the sun and contemplate (I had a snooze instead. It was lovely).

Off to class. The class instructor said knitting should make us feel good. If we don't care for or have difficulty doing a thing one way, it really doesn't matter, there are other ways to do that same thing that will make knitting feel good. She said knitting should be a place away from worrying about doing it right and should be about doing what works for us.

This morning I sat down with a good stiff coffee, knowing I had to figure it out. I picked up the needles and found the error. 8 rows below. I was not keen to try tinking 8 full rows, so I decided to see if I could just reknit the bad part. I don't mind trying new things, and I had seen several samples of how to repair something several rows below. There are a number of good photo tutorials on the net. Would this work for me? I decided not to worry about it, and just give it a try. The very worst that could happens was that I would end up carefully tinking the full rows.

I put point protectors on the needles with the unaffected stitches, found another set of needles of same size to work with and the gently and slowly began to unravel 5 stitches mid pattern repeat, down the 8 bad rows.

It was traumatic. I closed my eyes when I was done and took a deep breath, and with the aid of the right sized dpns, a very short time later, about 15 minutes, I was back up and knitting even. You can't even tell there was a problem and my counts are correct.

Before my class last night, I spent a couple hours worrying about what was I going to do. How was I going to be able to save the yarn? This morning after listening to the instructor, I left the worry behind and found a way that worked.

I intended to learn about some new ways to start toe up socks. I intended to learn a different toe shaping. I did learn those things but I took home much more.

The thing that made the difference was what the teacher reminded me of. I let go the worry and let the knitting speak. Letting the worry go was magic. Letting go of the worry let me find a way that worked. You never know what small things other knitters will say that will make good things happen. I only know the other knitters always bring magic.

Even if you are a top notch knitter, take a class.