Enjoying the Process

At the beginning of 2010, I joined the Intswemodo2010 on Ravelry.  Intswemodo=International Sweater-a-Month Dodecathon. Twelve sweaters in twelve months. Before I joined, I counted up my sweaters from 2009.  There were eight, and so it didn't seem beyond the realm of possibility that I could kick it up a notch and crank out four more in 2010. Well over eight months in and I have finished six sweaters.  It's not looking good for me right now (I firmly believe my new fascination with sweaters made with sock yarn is to blame).  Realistically there's no way twelve is going to happen, but I still have that goal nagging at me.  I'm all of five inches into the body of Vivian, and when I've looked at it the past few days, all I could think is that it's not going fast enough for me to get to the other sweaters waiting in the wings.  Stressing over the sweater made me not want to knit it, and I kept reaching for other projects.

I do this a lot with knitting.  I set all kinds of crazy goals, and before I know it, I start stressing over finishing things and forget that knitting is not work.  At 4 am this morning when I couldn't sleep (shocking, I know), I turned to Vivian determined to simply enjoy knitting.  For a good row and a half, this worked out perfectly as I knit along quite contently.  Then I spotted a problem:  one of my cables was crossed the wrong direction.  Now in a sweater with hundreds of cabled stitches, it's amazing that I felt this was something to worry about, but there was no way I was going to be able to let this one go.

At 4 am I was in no shape to deal with this problem, and I started working on a sleeve instead.  When I was better rested, however, I turned back to the cable problem.  The wrong cross-over was 6 rows down.  Maybe I could just drop all the stitches down, cross the cable to the right, and pick up all the stitches again, and everything would be perfect, right?

I'm kind of impressed with myself that I did just that.

Dropped down 4 stitches all six rows.  It looked a little scary at this point.

But thanks to a trusty crochet hook, there was a happy ending. All the stitches picked up rather nicely, and a few rows later, you could barely tell where I did all that "surgery".  All the cables were happily leaning to the right as they should.

Phew.  I've already got one project in progress with some huge mistakes; I was not mentally prepared to have two.  I guess that trying to be less of a perfectionist has some limits.  Nevertheless, somehow today reminded me to enjoy the process of knitting and to not think of only the end result when knitting a sweater.