That title pretty much sums up what happened after I left the knitting shop and was left to my own devices. Don't get me wrong, I had a very good teacher. It's just that there was so much to learn in two hours (casting on, knitting, purling, and even binding off) that it was impossible to remember everything, especially how to fix a mistake.
I had gotten a pretty good start on my scarf when I left, but things went downhill from there. Once I got home, I decided to knit another row or two. Just a couple of stitches into the first row, something screwy happened that left me frowning and contemplating what I did wrong and how I could fix it and move on with the row. Alas, there was no moving on because I couldn't for the life of me figure out how that extra stitch got there. I put the knitting aside and waited a couple of hours.
When I went back to it later, I still couldn't figure it out, so I frantically searched YouTube for some troubleshooting videos for knitters in the rough. I found some and, as I tried to copy what they were doing as they were doing it, pressing pause constantly with whatever finger I could wrestle free, I became even more confused and frustrated then ever. But I was bound and determined to fix this thing before the night was over. Even if I had to rip the whole thing out and start over again, which I did. By that time, my brain was so addled I didn't trust myself to remember how to cast on, so I looked at some more YouTube videos and managed to cast on a super-tight row of long-tail stitches. So tight that I could barely separate them into threes to count out 24 of them.
My cast-on complete, I started with my first row. Wedging my 7 mm bamboo needle between the cast-on needle and the uber-tight stitches chewed up that needle like a gnawed-on pencil. How am I supposed to knit a whole friggin scarf like this, I mused in abject frustration and bewilderment. Of course, I managed to make an "unfixable" mistake, so it was back to the drawing board.
A couple of cast-ons and rip-outs later, I decided to "reduce" my scarf by half, at least until I got the whole knitting process down to where I could knit several rows without having to rip out. Less stitches per row means less opportunity to make a mistake, right? WRONG!!! I was still making mistakes left and right, to the point where I cut my row to six, but to no avail. Several hours and groans and sighs of frustration later, I threw my hands up and just cried, "I can't do it!" Determination be damned, I had to take a break.
It was close to midnight then and I had already forfeited a night of watching the Olympics to my learn-how-to-knit-or-die-trying cause. I was too wound-up to go to bed, so I watched an episode of The Amazing Race that I'd DVR-ed awhile back and it provided me enough distraction to calm me down. Still, determined to get something accomplished before I hit the hay, I got back on the computer and looked at some of the YouTube videos again, this time with my knitting needles put aside. I was going to watch the tutorials all the way through without trying to do it myself. They featured a young, early 20-something girl teaching a group of cheerful, attentive teenagers, smiling while holding their knitting needles and colorful swatches-in-progress. Somehow, the calming Zen vibes of the teen knitting cafe reached me through the computer screen and I was able to go to bed in a considerably less stressed state of mind than I was about two hours before.
The next day, I started fresh by casting on a much looser row of stitches. As worked my first knitting row, I counted after every stitch to make sure the total number of stitches on each needle was 24. 1 and 23, 2 and 22, 3 and 21, and so on and so forth. It was tedious and painstaking, but it kept me on track and slowed me down so I didn't make mistakes. I knitted about four rows, purled two, and then began my knit three stitches, purl three stitches pattern that goes on until the scarf is a few inches short of five feet long. When I get to that point, I will purl two rows, then knit four rows and then bind off.
Once I got the hang of knitting and purling, I found that I really, really liked it. It's much more relaxing and fun when you know what you're doing! When I ran into a snafu, a wonky stitch that I just couldn't fix, I just stopped there and went to Needles in the Haymarket the next day and had one of the kind, helpful ladies who work there help me out. Eventually, I learned how to fix yarnovers and how to "tink", which is knit spelled backwards. Tinking is undoing stitches. I got a crochet hook for fixing dropped stitches, though I still need some practice in recognizing a dropped stitch. I'm about 2/3 of the way done with my scarf and next week, I'll start on my next project: a shrug. Never really having heard of a shrug before learning to knit, I can't think of a good way to describe it, except it's kind of like a combination of a shawl and a vest.
Pictures of the scarf will be posted when it's finished.
Great blog post, and I lived through it.
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