How to Become a Fearless Knitter

When you become aware of where your knitting difficulties are you can just learn to avoid them. For example, you may learn that it's a bad idea to start a really difficult project when you're at your knitting group.

You will probably go home and take the entire thing out because you've messed it up because you've been drinking wine, socializing, and having a great time. It's a lesson you usually only have to learn once.

Another lesson is maybe not checking your gauge before you start a project that really needs to fit correctly. Again, you will set yourself up for success in the future if you pay attention to the mistakes you're making now.

One wonderful benefit of getting better at making mistakes and practicing making mistakes is you get to practice letting go of things, taking out your knitting - knowing that it's just knitting.

You get to practice that feeling of letting go of something that you really don't want to let go of, something that you wished had gone right, and if this sounds to you a little like Buddhist philosophy you're probably right, but I found that it really goes a long way to making your knitting a lot more of an enjoyable experience.

Also you have become fearless, you're not afraid to try new patterns or things that may be challenging for you because you know that if you mess up you know where to go to get help, you know it's going to be okay, you know that you can always take it out in the future, so you're able to attempt, challenge yourself, and learn a lot more about projects than you would if you were worried about messing up and concentrating on focusing your efforts on projects where you are guaranteed to not mess up.

That's basically a recipe for never improving.

The top reason for messing up as much as you possibly can is you learn every mistake that there is to know about knitting and how to fix it. You become a knitting superstar. Anything that comes across you will have run into it because you have challenged yourself, messed up, and learned, and grown, and you will become a better knitter than you could ever dream.