What Learning to Sew Is Teaching Me About Knitting

As I Learn a New Skill I’m Taken Back to the Many Lessons Knitting Has Taught Me Along the Way

By no means have I learned all there is to learn about knitting. I’m still learning everyday – about this skill and about myself. Now that I’ve decided to add to my list of cottage core hobbies, I’m relearning some old lessons, seeing parts of knitting in a new light, and am getting a healthy dose of humility that comes with learning something new.

At first when this wave of neo-aestheticism was rising, I was getting annoyed. It felt like aesthetic became a buzzword and things just grew out of proportion quite quickly. However, having lived with it and explored it a bit, I’m getting on board now. I realize that is the creation of personas, these aesthetics have been made popular and I’m here for the cottage core aesthetic.

Abby Cox has a great video on this if you want to delve more into the topic – but we’re here for knitting and sewing and how they paradoxically teach us about life.

Lessons Learned from Sewing

Prepwork

If you’ve been here for a minute you’ve probably heard me babble on about not swatching. I used to think it was a waste of time. But now that I’ve been developing my own patterns and really testing them out in different yarns, boy do I get it.

Sewing reinforced this for me lately when I went shopping for fabric before really having an understanding of fabric, how it works, the stitches you need to use for the stretchier knits, and how they might behave differently. This lead to me picking a fabric that presented a few problems, but it’s working out and I’ve learned a lot.

Mistakes

My husband cowers in the corner when I’ve realized I made a mistake in my knitting. He always tries to assure me that no one will notice, but I can’t stand the sight of the piece once I’ve realized I made a mistake. And for me its always borderline way too late when I notice the mistake.

In learning something new like sewing, where the terms, techniques, and just about everything is new to me, I’m bound to make mistakes. Oh boy am I making mistakes. Sewing is reminding me that these are opportunities to learn, that not everything has to be perfect 100% of the time.

Learning to Sew and What It Has Taught Me About Knitting

Time and Space

I’m being reminded that when you can’t see your way through a potential problem, put it down for a bit. Giving yourself some time and space away from the project will help you pick it up and see it with new eyes. This happened to me yesterday, where I just could not understand the pattern that I was reading. I was getting defeated and frustrated, so I put it away. I tried working on another sewing project in the meantime and that blew up in my face. So, I put my sewing down for the night. When I looked at it today, rested and refreshed, after a little bit of time it clicked and I was off to my machine.

Learning to Sew has taught me a lot about my own knitting patterns.

Writing Patterns

Reading and trying to interpret a pattern that is brand new to me, and learn new skills from these patterns has reminded me of how I need to be really clear when drafting my knitting patterns. It’s further proof that my brain works a bit differently and I need to think about other people when writing instructions.

Patience

Having knit for a few years now, I’m used to being able to pick up new knitting skills fairly quickly. Sewing is a whole different game though and it’s taking me much longer to get even the basics down. This my fiber friends, is one tough lesson in having patience.