My Genius Hour Reflection: Learning from Mistakes

It is hard to believe it has already been a week since I began knitting my scarf! The past couple of days have been encouraging as I have seen considerable improvement in my work. In this reflection, I will look at two major improvements that I have noticed in the past few days.

Fixing Dropped Stitches

As I have discovered from my own knitting experiences, one of the most common mistakes in knitting is dropping a stitch. Usually a drop stitch happens when it slips off the needle instead of being brought over to the other needle. Often this dropped stitch goes unnoticed until several rows later when you see a tear in the fabric or a ladder of horizontal unfinished stitches. During the first couple of days, I frequently dropped stitches and usually did not notice until several rows later. Thankfully, both my grandmother and video tutorials came to the rescue as they demonstrated how to pick up the dropped stitch and bring it back up to the needle. Here’s the video tutorial that I followed from New Stitch a Day:

New Stitch a Day: Knitting and Crochet Video Tutorials. (2011, Aug. 18). How to Knit Picking Up a Dropped Stitch.
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayMDqGSqdKU&feature=youtu.be.

As I gain more experience knitting, I have dropped fewer stitches. I find that I usually notice when I am able to drop a stitch and am able to prevent it before it actually happens. When I do drop a stitch, I tend to notice it sooner and am able to fix it myself without asking my grandmother for help.

Tight Knitting 

Another common error for beginner knitters is to knit the stitches so tightly that it becomes difficult to insert the needle into the stitches. This was definitely something that I struggled with for the first few days. When I was first beginning to knit, I tended to grip the needles tightly and pull on the yarn tightly as I was not yet comfortable with the process of knitting. This resulted in very tight stitches that did not have any give, making it very difficult to insert my right hand needle into the yarn loop. If often took five or six tries to insert the needles which resulted in the yarn fraying. I did some research on knitting tension and found some helpful advice from Sheep and Stitch. From this blog, I learned that I need to be careful not to create my stitches using the tip of the needle as the tip of the needle is narrower and thus will result in smaller, tighter stitches. The next time I knit, I made sure to loosen my grip on the yarn, to loosen my pull on the yarn, and to use the full length of the needle rather than the tip. These changes definitely helped as I noticed an improvement both in the ease and speed of my knitting. I felt much more comfortable and began to develop a better rhythm of knitting.

It has been exciting to see such steady improvement in the last few days. As you can see in the picture below, lately my knitting has become more even and consistent. The length of the rows and the size of the stitches in the first half of the scarf seem to vary frequently. In the second half of the scarf, the rows appear to be much more uniform.

Olij, B. © 2016
[Photo from personal collection]

It is really neat to be able to visually see my progress as I develop my knitting knowledge and skills. As a perfectionist, there is a part of me that I could cut off that first, inconsistent patch of knitting so that the entire scarf would look uniform. At the same time, the teacher in me recognizes that the first section of my scarf was an important phase in my learning journey. That uneven, inconsistent section is a reminder that everyone is going to face setbacks or make mistakes when they take on a new challenge. The important question is, what will you do with your mistakes? Will you give up and let them overcome you or will you use them as a learning opportunity to grow and improve?