Adventures in Dropping Stitches

There are few things that terrify me when it comes to knitting, such as steeking (I could never cut my knitting!), size 0 needles (I’ll never finish anything on those teeny things), and skinny, laceweight yarn (goes hand in hand with the teeny needles).  Taking on the Clapotis, a project that has been in my queue for years since it was published in Knitty, is tackling one of those fears: dropping stitches

Dropping stitches has a stigma attached to it: as new knitters, we learn to fear it because it seems like something that impossible to fix.  To all knitters, it’s sign that oops, you made a mistake.  So to incorporate the concept of intentionally dropping stitches into a design seemed to blow my mind.  How could it be possible that doing that wouldn’t backfire and ruin a loved project?

The Clapotis is such a lovely scarf and oodles of knitters have made it in the last eight years since the pattern was published – that should be testament right there that this is a project with risks well worth the result.  And you know what?  Dropping that first stitch was ok.  I may have panicked when I sent down the stitch to be dropped, watching as it created a ladder down the edge of my knitting.  But when it got to the very end of the column and stopped unraveling, I breathed a sigh of relief that my knitting didn’t fall apart, that the pattern designer knew what she was doing when she wrote the pattern.  Since then, I have sent many other stitches to their dropped-down fate and the outcome of each dropped stitch has been just right.  I will say, there’s almost a rebellious feel to it – it’s making what would traditionally be a mistake into an intentional action.  Take that, knitting perfectionists!

I can’t say that I’ll be tackling any of my other knitting fears soon…especially steeking.  I shudder at the thought of taking my scissors to something that I spent hours working on.

So you know what mine are now – what are your knitting fears?