Lessons...Which Might Sound a Bit Like Whining

I'm not going to show you my secret project but I can share a few lessons I've learned over the last couple months:

There are a lot of types of mistakes to be made. For example, you can not understand a new pattern and do it wrong a couple different ways before you figure it out.

You can got lost in the pattern and skip parts or do some parts twice or do parts in the wrong order.

You can convince yourself you know the pattern and not look at it and make very interesting but unhelpful variations on the pattern.

Just because you go back and fix a mistake, doesn't mean you won't make the same mistake the second time through. Or a new mistake. You won't notice these mistakes until you get to that spot in the next round. Once you learn that lesson and start to check your work before starting a new round, you can still miss mistakes. (Kind of like proof reading your own text. We're not wired to see our own mistakes very easily.)

Once you have several parts, you can put them together wrong. You can put them in the wrong spot. Or you can put them in upside down. One time I even put the first part in right, thought it was wrong when I put in the second part so I took it out and made it match the second part only to discover that the second part was wrong after I completed the third part.

That section I took out this evening and tried very hard to put it in the right place. It took me two more tries.

Then when you unravel a part and then go to use the yarn again to redo the very same part, you can discover that it isn't long enough by about six stitches. It was long enough the first time, but for some reason isn't long enough any more. (That's where you stop for the night and whine a little on your blog, just in case you were wondering what put me over the edge.)

You can count wrong. You can even double count wrong. You can count right, but then still attach a piece to the wrong part. You can think you counted and double counted correctly but find out later that you missed one.

But, you can also concentrate so hard during the final row that you never make a mistake on it. This is important because there's no "next round" to find out you made a mistake. So far I think I'm good on that. (I may learn the lesson that you don't talk about success for fear of jinxing yourself, but I don't really believe in that so I'm not going to worry about it.)

You can also continue to chug along (even if it's two steps forward, one step back) and make excellent progress. Despite many little setbacks, it looks like I will get this done on schedule. Who will give me a wOOt wOOt on that?