Inspiration Saturday: Fixing mistakes

I still have some inspiring vacation tales to share with you all from my Phoenix trip, but this week I think my biggest inspiration has come from an unlikely part of knitting: mistakes.

No one wants to make mistakes.  They aren't fun.  There you are, happily knitting along, when you get to the end of a row and discover you don't have the right number of stitches, or stop to take a look and see that your lace pattern has gone askew somewhere.  Maybe you're lucky enough to find that you made a mistake on the current row and can just tink back some stitches and fix it.  But maybe not.  Maybe there are a few, or more than a few, rows in between you and your mistake.  And then you think about all the time you took to knit those rows, so blissfully unaware that they might be completely pointless.  Argh.

Usually, when I find that something has gone mysteriously wrong with my knitting, I hand it to my mother with a blank look of fear and frustration, and she magically fixes it.  I can handle simple things like tinkling back a few knit stitches, but I lack a few key things for fixing knit problems:

1. The experience to 'see' the knitting and recognize what has gone wrong.  (I'm getting better at this, but I still bristle when my mom says, 'Look, you can see ________.'  Because I can't.)
2. The technical skill to actually fix said mistake.
3. The confidence to realize that I have #1 and #2 to try fixing it myself.

In this past week, though, I did some of my own mistake-fixing.  As I was finishing my socks, I noticed that about 8 or 10 rows down I had missed some of the purl bumps in the textured row of my pattern.  Drat.  And it was going to be a few days before I would see my mom.  I looked up some Knitting Help and YouTube about dropping down a single stitch and re-knitting back up the ladder.  But without the right crochet hook, and needing to fix about 15 stitches, it was just easier to frog back down instead.  Picking up all of the stitches after ripping is something I'm always paranoid about, but somehow I managed it, and because I had seen all of those tutorials about how to knit a stitch that's a row below the one you are working on, I was able to catch the ones that had gone too far down.

Even though making a mistake isn't exactly inspiring, it is inspiring to be able to fix it.  I'm glad I still have my mom to turn to, though, because I needed her later in the week for my camisole.  Baby steps.

For more inspiration, go to Woolen Diversions.