Yet More Hints for Knitters

My mother taught me to knit when I was six years old, chronically sick with tonsilitis, and bored in bed.  I've knitted ever since, although I supose I only took it up in earnest somewhere along about 1986.  Still, any way you look at it, I've been knitting rather a long time, and still I keep learning.  Here are some things I have recently become aware of.

• Just as it is unwise to knit late at night, so also is it unwise to knit first thing in the morning.  Do not open your eyes, grab your knitting (which of course is always within reach) and try to do a few rows before getting up.  Have your breakfast first, and your coffee or tea.

• Especially in more complicated patterns, don't use the purl-back row just to coast and relax.  Instead, use it to count your stitches.  This helps catch mistakes early.  

• Do not hum while counting sitches!  Do not try to remember how the phrase goes in Greek or what the words were to that old hymn you loved when you were a Protestant.  Knitting, like prayer, requires vigilance against distractions.  Concentrate on your counting or your song will cause you to miscount.  If you don't much feel like doing this, you may not be in the proper mood for knitting and may like to do something else for a while.  Washing dishes is a chore admirably suited for humming.

• Stitch markers, with a known number of stitches between, make it easier to isolate and find a mistake.  Suppose you know there should be 60 stitches in the row but after three counts, there really are only 59.  If you know there ought to be 12 stitches between markers, you only have to find which pair contains only 11, and then it is easier to figure out why.  You may, in this way, be spared having to rip out the whole row.

Happy knitting, and may all your mistakes occur near the end of the row!