The Ink-Pot and the Palette

You've reminded me of another skill I intend to acquire this year. I can tell knit and purl stitches apart, but there's a lot about "reading the knitting" that I'm not very good at. I suck and counting rows (which is how my sleeves turned ridiculous), I'm marginal at counting stitches, I have a hard time detecting where an increase or decrease actually happened--stuff like that.

I have a knitting co-worker, justjen, who can read a piece of knitting as easily as I read a paragraph of text. She can spot exactly where you went wrong, and how, when something looks funny. She can deconstruct cables and find her own mistakes in huge swaths of lace.

I'd like to get better that that kind of thing. Plain old practice and repetition will help, I know, but I think mindfulness--the intention to learn it, and a plan for learning--will make it smoother.

Oh! Two skills in this area that I've acquired while making this Aran are correcting a mistake several rows down by laddering just a few stitches (I rescued a 6-stitch cable this way \o/); and ripping back with confidence. I used to be afraid that I could never pick up all the stitches again, but I've learned how. So that's progress!