Tada! Or maybe it’s Phew! I just finished reknitting my first scarf, which also makes it my second scarf, I suppose. Now it’s nice and flexible and soft and long and flat. Totally worth the effort. And as usual, I learned a lot.
At the beginning, I felt a little queasy to be ripping down the old version and knitting it into the new version. As I progressed and the yarn straightened out, it got easier to keep pulling out the old and knitting the new. The first few times when I had to rip out whole big fat stripes at once, that hurt. But by the time I could see the end coming, I could hardly wait to pull it apart.
I got lots of practice at knit, knit, purl, purl, so much that around the halfway point, I discovered I could knit without looking. Mostly I learned to keep the tips of the needles close together, and push just the next stitch up to be worked with my left fingers, and smooth the worked stitches onto the right needle with my right fingers. I can still feel the yarn under my fingers as I fall asleep.
Whether or not I was looking at my work, I made mistakes and dropped stitches but not nearly as often as I expected to. I learned how to tink, or unknit, to fix mistakes on the same row. I learned how to take out a crochet hook and ladder down a column a few rows down so I could turn knits into purls and vice versa. More than anything, I learned not to fear the frog.
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