Sometimes the Fix Is Smaller Than You Think

Not so long ago, I was working on my Seven Sisters Top. Everything was going along just fine until I reached the point where I needed to put some stitches on hold. As I was counting, I realized I had a problem. Not a "one or two stitches off" kind of problem that you can convince yourself will block out. I had twenty extra stitches. Twenty. I counted them three times because I was fairly certain they weren't supposed to be there, and I was hoping that maybe the third count would reveal that I simply couldn't count.

It did not.

My first thought was, Well... that's not ideal. My second thought was considerably less family friendly.

As with most knitting disasters, my brain immediately skipped to the worst possible conclusion. I started mentally calculating how much knitting I was going to have to rip out. Had I accidentally been increasing for the last several inches? Did I completely misunderstand the pattern? Was I about to frog half the sweater? The whole sweater? I had no idea, but I was already preparing myself for the worst.

The sweater had actually been coming out a little larger than I'd expected anyway, but I'd already decided I could live with that. Oversized and long doesn't really do me any favors, but oversized and cropped is actually kind of cute. I figured I could simply make it a little shorter and call it intentional. Twenty extra stitches, however, felt like a different category of problem altogether.

I could have frogged it. I could have kept knitting in the hope that the problem would somehow solve itself. I could have spent another hour staring at it while getting increasingly frustrated. But instead, I decided that Tomorrow Michelle might be smarter than Today Michelle, and I let Tomorrow Michelle deal with it.

I put the sweater in Time Out.

Thankfully, Tomorrow Michelle had better reading comprehension.

The next morning I sat down with a fresh cup of tea and started reading through the pattern again. It took all of about twenty seconds before I realized what I'd done. The mistake wasn't in my knitting at all—it was in my reading.

The pattern has you work the front and back separately. After finishing the front, I was supposed to begin the back at the section called Shape Armholes. Instead, I had happily skipped ahead and started knitting Shape Front Neck, which is an excellent instruction to follow if you're making... another front. That has armholes, even.

Once I realized what had happened, the fix was almost embarrassingly simple. I tinked back a few stitches and carried on. The catastrophe turned out to be about two minutes' worth of work.

It made me think about how often we do this outside of knitting, too. We discover that something is wrong, and our brains immediately leap to the biggest, most painful explanation we can imagine. Sometimes we're right, of course. Sometimes the problem really is that big. But I've also learned that a surprising number of problems look much worse at nine o'clock at night than they do the next morning after a good night's sleep and another careful read of the instructions.

I've found that's true in knitting, in business, and in life. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do isn't to panic or to power through. Sometimes it's to make a cup of tea, go to bed, and trust that you'll be better at solving the problem tomorrow.

Epilogue

Now, I wish I could tell you that this story ends with me feeling wise and accomplished.

Unfortunately, about fifteen minutes after solving the mystery of the twenty extra stitches, I accidentally put the kids' chocolate milk mix into my tea instead of their warmed milk.

Unlike the sweater, this mistake was immediately obvious.

I considered making another cup. Then I decided that I had apparently reached my daily quota for solving problems and drank it anyway. It wasn't good, but at that point I was committed.