There is a particular kind of humiliation reserved for the moment you encounter a new knitting abbreviation mid-project. You’ve been going fine, in the zone, minding your own business, and then: KFB. You read it. You read it again. Knit front and back: conceptually, you understand what is being asked of you. Your hands, however, have not received the memo.

Oh, the joy of not being a kid anymore and having to learn something new! 

I’m a jack of all trades, and especially of many hobbies. Which means I try things I’m up for trying new ways of creating, but oh boy, does my brain get in the way. 

The Problem With Knowing Things

When I was a kid, trying a new thing was easy – at the end of the day, almost everything I was doing or trying was new to me. There was no concept of hurt ego if something wouldn’t work out. I would just try again.
But now I’m all grown, and unfortunately, with my head getting phisycally bigger, it also created a lot more space for my ego to develop.
And that ego sometimes plays tricks on me when I am trying something new: because this should be easy, I already tried so many new things, piece of cake, it seemed so easy watching that video tutorial, I can do this with my eyes closed. And then, I try it…and it doesn’t land. And that bruises the ego a bit: there’s something wrong with the tools, the tutorials are fake and edited. It can’t be that I can’t do this, is that the people that explained it did a bad job.
I had no such thoughts at 7. I would just throw the draft away and try again.
Now? I’m gonna spend 30 minutes thinking about what was wrong with the information I consumed to prepare myself instead of using those 30 minutes to, I don’t know? Try again and maybe get it better? 

A Quick Word on Increases (Humour Me)

Queue all the possible knitting increases that I learned in the past year since I taking the craft more seriously. Knitting increases are how your fabric grows; they’re the instructions that tell your work to add a stitch, and by extension, a little more width, a little more shape. Without them, you’d only ever be knitting rectangles. They come in a surprisingly large family: KFB (knit front and back) works the same stitch twice to make two from one, the reliable, slightly bumpy workhorse. M1L and M1R (make one left and right) pick up the bar of yarn running between stitches and twist it into a new stitch, nearly invisible when done right, directional by design. Yarn overs create a stitch deliberately out of thin air, leaving a small decorative hole. And then there are the lifted increases, RLI and LLI, which reach into the row below to pull up a loop, so seamless that experienced knitters swear by them and argue about them at equal volume. They each leave a different signature on the fabric, and a well-written pattern picks them with intention. Learning which one to reach for, and why, is the difference between following a pattern and understanding it.

Enter: KFB

So here I am, happily knitting and checking my pattern for the next steps. KFB comes. I search on the interwebs, I look at pictures, I watch tutorials. I even go on Reddit to check what the internet aunties recommend. And I try it!
But my muscles, never mind my brain, don’t quite get the movements yet, so it ends up wonky.
So I try again, and again, and again.
Now a better adjusted human might go with it wonky. Put the work down, take a breather, try again later.
Me? I’m gonna sit there for half an hour, rereading and rewatching, and thinking of all the ways the instructions are wrong, and I can’t be making a mistake because I know stuff. I’m good at what I do. Always.
There it is, ladies and gentlemen, my ego getting in my way of improving. Not getting things right is a personal offense like no other sometimes, especially when it comes to doing things I love and that bring me joy.
Now, thankfully, besides growing an ego, I like to think I also gathered a bit of wisdom through the years and learn how to recognize when I’m standing in my way and put myself in time out for a bit. It doesn’t make it any less difficult to deal with the boundaries my own stubborn brain places in my way. 

The Upside of Not Knowing What You’re Doing

Now, I think being a begginer on some techniques in a craft you’re relatively decent in otherwise comes from some benefits. I don’t think it’s inherently wrong to think that there’s something amiss with the tutorials you watched or explanations you got. But the trick is to have those challenging thoughts without placing blame on them for your initial failures. With fresh eyes, and no muscle memory, you’ll place a lot more attention on the way the stitch is mounted, the direction of the twist, the feel of picking up a bar compared to a yarn over. Experienced knitters that already have all of these perfected do them so seamlessly, out of pure muscle memory, that they might not stop and challenge the theory. And if you marry the wisdom of knowing parts of a craft, with curiosity instead of ego, who knows: maybe you’ll be the next to bring the new SSK. 

Three Options, One Bruised Ego

Now, when you don’t get that increase perfectly the first time, you have a couple of options:
(a) you keep your wonky first attempts in and move on with the pattern. You’ll have that as a visual memory of the time you learned how to apply the technique and most likely, no one but you will know about it
(b) you switch to a different increase type that does the job, but might not offer the same visual cohesion on close inspection. You don’t learn the new technique, but hey, you finish your project without a lot of hassle, and again, most likely no one will ever know
(c) you keep on trying the new increase type, but you do so patiently and kindly with yourself and accept you’ll need to play wack-a-mole with your ego along the way. Which gets you to finish the piece as it was designed, with more hassle, but still – no one will ever know. 

Those are the things you need to balance when making a decision on how you approach learning a new technique. 

The Growing Pain

Truth is, being made to feel a tiny bit incompetent at something you love and care about hurts. But there’s a lot of types of pain, and this one’s, fortunately, is something I’d consider a growing pain. It shows your evolving and learning more, and at the end of the knitting session you’re left there not only knowing how to physically apply the concepts, but better understanding why the technique works, and not just what the end result is. It’s an uncomfortable gift to get, because it puts us face to face with the unknown of all the things we just, well…don’t know yet. But it’s important to reframe those petulent ego burst and turn them into something that keeps us evolving. 

Now My Fingers Just Know

My fingers and brain now do KFBs without a lot of effort – and it’s my favourite increase when workin in gather because, as I said before: no one will know, how would they know? That first time using it was a slog, and a bit of a pain, but now my muscles can execute them with the zapp of 2 brain cells connecting. I did avoid it for a while, afraid of how it made me feel about my craft, but persevering turned it into an easy tool in my arsenal. So if I’m honest with myself about a skill I avoided learning because it gave me an ego auchie, what comes to mind when you ask yourself what’s a technique that made you feel incompetent, and are you gonna let your ego win and not let you master it?