3KCBWDAY6 Improving Your Skill Set

Knitting and Crochet Blog Week Day 6
Topic of the Day: Improving Your Skill Set

I have not been really wordy in any of my posts this week but I could write pages on all the ways I want to improve my knitting skills. Don't worry I won't though. I have been knitting for just over three years and I thought I was doing pretty well. But recently I have looked at blogs of knitters that have been knitting for less time and I am amazed, envious, and a little discouraged by the difficult pieces they are mastering. But everyone knows that comparing yourself to others is never a good idea. I like this quote.
Comparing yourself to others can...result in either feelings of inferiority or superiority...Accept yourself as the unique person that you are without comparing yourself to others. Doing this will help you love yourself properly without conceit. --Clark Swain
So I am going to accept myself as the knitter I am. And appreciate the progress I have made. Things I thought I would never be able to learn I have accomplished. Let me celebrate a few of those with you.
I have only taken one knitting class. Mostly due to lack of child care and wanting to spend my limited craft money on supplies instead. But I took a cabling class at my LYS last December and made three of these narfs. (The instructor called them neck warmers but I was not a fan of that name. I suppose the proper name is a cowl. But I like the combination of scarf and neck warmer better. :) The class was really fun and made me want to take more. There are so many great classes as my LYS. If I can just keep my husband in town for the first Saturday of any month I can sign up for a spinning for knitters class, which is next on my list. The other things that I accomplished so far were learned from books or internet videos.

So with that said I will tell you the things I am most interested in learning right now. My plan is that by this time next year all of these things will be crossed off my list. 
The last one brings me to the book above. I found it at my local library and have been making my way through it. Lots of the techniques are things that I already know but others are things that I am doing wrong so it has been good to correct myself. I think that I am hesitant to knit much on my sweater because I am not confident in my ability to sew the seams and make it look beautiful. I picked up this book in the hopes of gaining that confidence so I can make a hand made sweater that is not obviously homemade. Know what I mean?

As I am working on current projects I am going back and checking the book making sure that I am doing the techniques, like sewing seams, blocking, etc, correctly.  So many things in my life are not perfect that I am starting to feel this intense desire to make my knitting as perfect as I can. Don't worry it has not gotten so bad that I will stop creating for fear of failure. It is just motivating me to slow down and pay more attention to the little details as I am knitting. That is a good kind of perfectionism I think. So far anyway I have not gone crazy. 



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