"If we are to achieve a rich culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place."
-- Margaret Mead
In the vastness of the Universe, I am contemplating the role of frogging and how it applies to me because it is easy to become frustrated and rip everything you've done in a "dark night of the soul" moment. I know...I've done it so many times. I used to just start over instead of painstakingly unraveling each stitch because it seemed so much easier.
But as of late I have been trying to let the yarn teach me. Patience has never been a strong suit of mine...being an Aries I am very headstrong...
I have learned that there are degrees of frogging. Sometimes you have to rip the whole thing out and it is unavoidable, but other times you only need to rip out a few rows. And unknitting takes patience you can't just unknit. You need to see the flow of your piece and make sure all the stitches aren't twisted as you transfer them from needle to needle.
It seems this is a lesson that I must learn since both my son's sweater and my clapotis decided last night would be a good time for a class in frogging. So here I sit on a lily pad beside the frog pond unraveling my work stitch by stitch and row by row and somehow I realize that this is a good thing.
Frogging helps to fix mistakes that might probably later ruin my work. So it is a necessary part of knitting, it has its place in the Universe and right now I bow to tonight's lesson of patience
Ruinwen
:)
3 comments:
hey there Ruinwen!
Thanks for posting this about frogging. I am looking at it totally different now....and in a good way!
Rebecca
Everytime I hear someone say "I'm too impatient to knit" I tell them: "you don't have to be patient to knit, you have to be patient to tink." Since these people aren't knitters, you know I have to explain tink to them. Ruinwen, this is just an equisite piece of writing on a subject near and dear to my heart (having just frogged Aibhlinn for the KRKAL).
Good lesson! I was so determined to get that dang hat right that I wasn't even fazed by having to re-work the fifth round four times.
Now that it's obvious that the hat's too big (and that I should have paid attention to stuff like gauge and needle size specified in the pattern), I'm going to re-work it using the old hat as my yarn ball. :)
--rueyeet
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