Mistakes as Innoculation
01.09.2019
When I started knitting, I chose it as a mindful, stress relieving activity. Little did I know I’d find myself choosing every more fiddly and tedious projects, too stubborn to put down an annoying project and move on to a more relaxing one. That stubborness is how I found myself working on this same pair of gray ribbed lace socks for more than a year. Of course, I didn’t actually work on them for a year, or they’d have been done much faster. I mostly just avoided then for a year.
The turning point, surprisingly, came when I made my first exptremely visible mistake on them. If you look closely (extremely visible is in the eye of the beholder) you can see that one of those socks has several wonky spots in the lace pattern where it shifts to the side, then back again. I got off track, I didn’t notice. By the time I realized it I was out of my depth in trying to take the stitches out, and there it was: a big ugly mistake.
Surprisingly though, suddenly knitting these socks wasn’t so annoying. Given my commitment to accepting my imperfect crafts, there was no way I was going to quit on them then. I didn’t really care anymore if they were perfect, because I already knew they weren’t. I was no longer preoccupied with counting every stitch so carefully. With that freedom, I kept on knitting until I had 2 socks, and I wore them on my feet, and I could see that nobody could possibly notice the mistake from all the way up at standing height anyway, and it absolutely doesn’t matter.
The final surprise came for me when my second sock was, in fact, perfect. Apparently, freed from the tyranny of perfecionism, I went ahead and calmly knitted the perfect sock.