My goal for this week according to my learning plan is: keep working on becoming comfortable with the hand motion and develop the ability to do it more smoothly and at a faster/more rhythmic pace.
How it’s going
I’ve always found that the most effective way to improve at any knitting skill is through repetition. I’ve been thinking a lot about this because of the ”I taught myself” project that I recently did for my cross-curricular inquiry class. For that project we had to reflect deeply on how we were able to teach ourselves something and the process of breaking down that activity into tasks that we could accomplish.
One of the aspects of this is ”automaticity” or the process of moving from cognition to habit. That’s essentially what I was getting at when I set this particular goal for myself this week, but I’m realizing that with a technique like this it actually takes a lot longer than two or three weeks to develop this.
Involving others in my learning journey
I was starting to feel a bit frustrated and not super excited about my project. What I love most about knitting is the feeling I get when I have a good handle on the technique that I’m using and it starts to become relaxing. I haven’t been able to achieve that yet, so I haven’t been feeling that motivated to pick up the needles.
This weekend I was visiting my mom in Vancouver. She was the one that taught me to knit in the first place, although she would tell you that I’ve since surpasses her skills. We’re in a place now where we are able to learn from each other—she has more experience with cables, I have more with colourwork.
She has also never made anything with mosaic knitting but since she has a good understanding of knitting in general, I decided to bring my project with me and try and explain how mosaic knitting works.
The process of talking to my mom about what I’m doing definitely helped with motivation. It made me consider the importance of community in our learning endeavours!
I’ve had another opportunity to involve someone else in my learning journey too. My partner is a knitter and despite picking it up after me has surpassed me in many skills. When she saw my project she felt inspired to start her own, and of course has somehow managed to exceed my progress of close to a month in a week.
This has been great for my learning journey! I was stuck on my project yesterday–the chart was confusing me and I didn’t understand how to read the repeat symbols. I was able to look at my partner’s project and tell what to do next from it!
Progress
As you may have noticed from the comparison photo, I haven’t achieved much actual knitting this week, mostly because I’ve been extremely busy and knitting can be excruciatingly slow, especially when you’re learning something new. I did do a couple of rows but you can’t really tell because you can’t see the next row of flowers emerging yet. For next week I want to have another row of flowers completed!