Starting Over

May 6

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Knitting. Though I am joining today Small Things' Knitting and Reading yarn along, for me it is more like Ripping Out and Starting All Over yarn along.Last week I cast on a dress (Pure on Ravelry), which I was supposed to finish today, but circumstances got into the way. If you have ever done machine knitting, you know how tricky it can get. Though the process definitely takes much less time than hand knitting, the preparation is usually more time-consuming. You cannot possibly check your piece until it is off the machine, as it is too stretched on the machine bed, so you must trust your gauge 100%. And here is when the tricky part starts. When you knit your piece on the machine the gravity comes in to play its game - knitting starts stretching as it grows hanging from the machine. So to get an exact gauge you need to knit a very large piece to calculate all the stretching and deforming along the way. Here is where I slipped. My swatch wasn't big enough. As I was knitting the dress I felt that it was growing suspiciously fast and I hadn't even got to armhole bind off yet. So, I took it off the machine and measured it. Well, if I was going to continue, at the end I would get something like a wedding dress with a long train... No matter how painful it was, I had to take 3 hours of knitting off the machine.The good news is that I have a huge swatch to measure my gauge now, my deadline is postponed until Friday and I have all the math done and redone. So, not that bad at the end of the day.One more piece is in the process of ripping out.And here I can't even count how many hours I spent on it. I feel like I "overtapered" or "overshaped" my lace crochet project. It's hard to explain, but it just doesn't feel right. I am starting over, not giving up on it - I love it even in the ripping out stage :)I have a question for you - How do you handle your knitting/crochet mistakes?I've come a long way from promising not to make anything ever again to just dealing with them and keep going. I started to look at mistakes as the way to learn and move forward. Whenever I feel the ripping off is inevitable, I try to focus not on the time I DID spend on it, but on the time I WILL spend on it and get something that is not quite right at the end. I stop, come back and fix it. I always have this amazing feeling when I am done - everything fits as it was supposed to fit and I have a bonus - new piece of knowledge that will help me to avoid time costly mistakes next time. I once read in a book on psychology - "Most of us are allergic to mistakes, ... but mistakes are our guideposts for improvement". Do you tend to have mistake allergies?Reading. Wuthering Heights in Spanish. Why, why do I love to complicate my life? :) As my spoken Spanish is pretty fluent now, I decided to try something more challenging. Last time I read Wuthering Heights was 5-6 years ago, during my university years. Now it's time to look at it from slightly different perspective - Cumbres Borrascosas. Well, I feel this will be time-consuming!