I wonder if other yarn-wranglers (either Knitters or Crocheters) go through the same thing I do. Worthy of a blog post? Probably not but the one thing I've struggled with more than ANYTHING in nearly a year's worth of learning to knit and crochet is the maths.
Whether we like it or not, Maths is all around us - and whenever I have to do anything maths-like, this is exactly how I feel...
Knitting and Crochet inevitably involve counting (which I can still do, despite being an old git). and I even bought one of those dinky little digital row / stitch counters to help me with the OTHER big problem with knitting and crochet, being distracted mid way through a tricky bit.
"Darling, the dog is on fire!" just as you sit down to knit a row of blackberry stitches.
"Wait...we don't own a dog. AND YOU NEVER CALL ME DARLING!"
You know the kind of thing.
But this is nothing compared to what happens when you are trying to get your work a lot neater, and begin to realise that in order to complete a pattern, or perhaps calculate the number of stitches required to get a piece of work to measure up, or start to consider different sizes, stitch tension, yarn types etc...it's time for explodey brain syndrome (this is a term I've just made up that describes what it's like for someone like me with mild dyscalculia when they're confronted with sums, even the relatively simple ones that go with K & C.
Most of the time I'm extremely lazy and just wing it. I mean we all get by with a bit of winging it from time to time, right? But then when you see an intricately plotted and gorgeously knitted piece of work from someone in the Twitter or Ravelry community, you know that those sharp-eyed steely-brained SOBs are maths geniuses who think nothing of plotting their work out to the nth degree, filling notebooks with patterns and formulae and "Doing it properly" rather than just blitzing wool together into a semblance of a piece of work.
I like freeform crochet and knitting, but it gets you into bad habits. It's convenient to have a few stitches in your repertoire that you return to again and again, but it also means that once you start to dig into other more complex stitch or pattern types, maths once again rears its ugly logical head and you need to resign yourself to the fact that to get the very best out of your work, you're gonna need to count, and add, and multiply and eventually subtract, possibly divide but eventually (hopefully) conquer!
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