Ginni and I are teaching the Fixing your Mistakes class tomorrow evening. It's a great class on how to handle knitting's unexpected challenges, like when your needle falls out of your work, how to pick up a dropped stitch, and how to correct an increase or decrease a few rows back. We have to be able to do these things, because nobody is perfect. We all make mistakes, and that’s okay.

There's a huge gulf between perfectionism and healthy striving. Healthy striving is working hard and doing your very best. We're all about that at the shop. On the other hand, perfectionism is a paralyzing focus on doing something perfectly or creating something perfect. Perfectionism is not constructive. Psychology researcher, Dr. Brené Brown explains it best when she calls perfectionism a shield we use to protect ourselves from vulnerability and pain. If we're perfect, then no one can criticize us, right? No one will make fun of what we've made because it's perfect, right? And if they do criticize us or laugh, then what we made, and by extension, who we are, isn't perfect enough, right? So begins a very dangerous false logic. Sometimes the vulnerability and fear is so powerful that we can’t even get started. We don't even try because continue reading