No One Told Me There'd Be Math, Part One

i am not a little obsessed with knitting these days.

i read knitting blogs now. and buy yarn without projects in mind. and shop for yarn bags. i see stitches in my sleep.

but but but. i am not a good knitter. a genuinely good knitter dives in to several projects and isn't afraid of frogging ("frogging" = "undoing," see what i'm learning?) a single project several times just to get it right. a genuinely good knitter experiments with patterns and tries things out and learns new stitches and has several projects going at once. and a genuinely good knitter sees this:

Next row K1, (k2tog, k6) 6 times, k2tog, k7 -51 sts

and thinks, ah yes.

i see that and have a more natural response. namely, "um."

so there i was, knitting at the laundromat, absolutely paralyzed. i put my knitting down and stared at the directions. up to now, knitting directions looked like this:

knit all rows

hum. so i look and think okay, K1 must mean knit one stitch. probably. and i can do that. but then what the fuck is the next part? um...math...equations...is it like this?

K1, (k2tog, k6) 6 times, k2tog, k7 -51 sts actually means 1 + (2 + 6)6 + 2 + 7 = x

and x = the number of stitches i was supposed to start out with. is that right?

but if i started with 58 then how could 1 + (2 + 6)6 + 2 + 7 = 66? plus, what if i started with 56 instead of 58 (which i did because clearly, i am at a stage where i can alter patterns...)

i had no idea if i was reading the directions properly anyway. maybe "(k2tog, k6) 6 times" means something entirely different since 66 makes no sense at all. 66??

it was at this point in the laundromat that a genuinely good knitter would just plow through and try it and see how it develops.

instead i'm me, so i put the needles away and waited until i could see MyBoss in person and have her explain how to read the directions. and count.