When I was young, and learning, I skipped a stitch.
I was crocheting a rainbow granny square under my grandmother’s tutorship. She showed me the ropes when my family and I were visiting, and that night in a Florida hotel room I stayed up making til I ran out of yarn. When I offered the loose, loopy square to her the next day I felt like I had walked on the moon—I had achieved something beautiful.
When she taught me to join a new skein of yarn, I scowled at something two rows deep: where there should have been a cluster of three double crochets was a sad pairing of two. How could I have blundered like this? My eight-year-old brain drained me of my pride. These are the moments I give up. She must have seen those first traces of defeat on my face because she said something next that I’ll never forget:
“We’ll go back and fix it later.”
Heartened, I moved forward into the next lesson. I continued to be curious about how we’d fix it, but I trusted that she knew more than me. She did.
Because it wasn’t until many months later that I remembered we never fixed the skipped stitch. Instead, it remained woven into the square as a reminder of my newness to the craft. It was one stitch, one slip-up, in a thousand.
I’ll probably skip a thousand more in this lifetime. It is better to finish a blanket than to unravel the whole thing because of a few bad stitches.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, text your grandma, and pull the yarn out of the back of your closet. It’s time to create again.