Better Learning Through Undoing

Note to self: pay attention when resuming knitting.

I got home from work ready to return to knitting the baby blanket. I blew through about eighty stitches and was impressed with how quickly I'd knitted them. I was almost at the end of the row. That's when I realized I didn't follow the pattern at the beginning of the row. Blast!

I turned to my emergency help line to confirm what I was afraid was the solution. I would have to undo about eighty stitches. I seriously considered knitting the rest of the row and restarting the pattern on the next one. It's not like there aren't some mistakes in it already. (I forgot to do yarn overs a couple times or did them at the wrong spot. Those errors are too far back to fix.) Reluctantly, I decided to go through the painstaking process of unknitting all those stitches.

If making mistakes is the best way to learn, then consider me schooled in undoing stitches. I've struggled at times to see how some should be undone. I think I've got it down now, save for the first/last stitch on the needle. That one always throws me. It took me a half hour to get the job done while watching the baseball game, but everything was as it should have been. Knitting stitches after they've been undone is a little more difficult--that's common, right?--so it was slow going to get the row done properly. Whether it was not enough sleep the last couple nights or the major shift toward colder temperatures again, I was ready to doze and did so through the next two and a half innings.

Now that I was alert and had probably ruined my sleep pattern for tonight, I picked up the blanket and continued to decrease. If I counted correctly, I'm down to seventy stitches in the row. As you can see in the above photo, it's getting there.