Sunday 10 January 2016

My brain hurts

I have been sitting here knitting this second pattern on my wrap for a couple of hours now, and while I am pretty sure somewhere down the road the zen will come back, right now, things are far from zen.



It isn't a hard pattern or a particularly hard technique.  Few things are terribly hard in knitting so long as you set your preconceptions aside and just do exactly what it tells you.

There is a certain syllogism to knitting, a linear progression where you do this and then you do that and you get this. Yet for all the unswerving logic, the pure pleasure of knitting is when you make an error but the error is good, sometimes even great, and creates something with its own logic and its own syllogistic perfection. 

But as you can see, my error has no logic or perfection.
It is about the 4th section from the start of the pattern round.  By the 4 time you knit a repeat, it should be in ones brain well enough that you don't have to stop and think it through.  And that is the problem.  It's exactly the same as the counting problem in lace.  Sometimes counting to two is a bridge too far.

I'm over thinking it. After learning the section the first time through, I just knit with the feeling that I was really coming to understand the subtlety of the pattern. And I was, because the next two sections were right.  On that 4th section, I caught myself wondering if I was doing it right. Had that thought not popped into my head to interrupt the flow of what I was doing, I probably would have done ok.  As it was, I did not.

I redid this repeat twice right after I knit it.  Then I moved on, and stopped to admire my work and saw it was still wrong.  I slipped the stitches back and redid them...wrong for the third time.  I will be re-knitting them for the 4th time, when I get to them as I work the next round. 

Trusting myself the first time is something I need to improve on.  In a lot of ways. Till then my head hurts and I think I need more coffee and I continue to search for the syllogism in my life.

1 comment:

Sel and Poivre said...

I've found many times sometimes what feels "wrong" isn't, its just not something that works with what I have and so I have to either get rid of/abandon it or come to terms with living with its issues. The older I get the more things from this latter category I seem to have but then, the better I am getting at finding ways to live happily with or despite them.

Of course knitting is among the easiest of these - just rip it out and make it into something else - can't do that with an irritating relative!

Meanwhile, 'still loving the creamy look of those stitches from here!