Knitting this past week has turned into a true test of my patience. When I first picked up the needles and yarn from the store, I sat on the couch, extremely eager to get knitting away. I had little to no problems regarding the skills I was attempting to learn: the slip knot, casting on, and the knit stitch. Within a day of learning, I had a small patch that I had knitted just as practice. I set the knitting down for a few days, sure that I would be able to pick it back up as easily as I had learned it the first week. Boy, was I wrong about that. Over this week, I attempted to continue to use the same video I used last week in order to begin creating a dishcloth as my first project. It felt like no matter how hard I tried to complete the simple steps I had already learned, I was unable to do a single thing right. The main part I struggled with was Keeping the stitches just tight enough. I found that either my stitches would be too loose and would not hold up, or they would be so tight on the needle that I wasn’t able to thread the other needle through to create another stitch. This I am still working on through trial and error, determining how taught the yarn needs to be. On the flip side, I would concentrate on not stitching too tight and overcompensating, causing the yarn to slip off the needle.

Once frustrated to an extremely high degree, I got my phone out and began searching for solutions. I came across another blog that highlighted the 15 most common mistakes that beginning knitters struggled with. I appreciated that this blog post simply stated what the struggle might be, with an accompanying image of the mistake. This allowed me to identify the mistakes that I was making, even if I was unfamiliar with the terms such as drop stitches, adding yarn overs, etc. The greatest thing about this blog was that below the description of each mistake, the author created links to videos they created about how to solve the problem at hand. I appreciate I could use this one site to both diagnose and remedy the mistakes I was making. I didn’t have to flip back and forth between YouTube as by clicking on a link, it directed me right to the video I needed to watch. I would highly recommend checking out the Nimble Needles blog for those looking for information on tools, stitches, tutorials, patterns, etc.

Overall, due to my increased frustration and anger this week, my knitting needles stayed mostly jammed into my ball of yarn. Next week, with the help of some new resources and tools, I hope to have much more success and an enjoyable, rewarding experience that “real knitters” always seem to be going on about.