This Is Your Brain on Yarn.

I’ve tried knitting lace before, and I’ve had modest successes with small repeats and with patterns of just a few rows.  But after admiring the intricate and elegant sweater patterns in French Girl Knits and deciding to try my hand at one, I knew that I was in for a challenge.  And I’m here to report that I emerged triumphant—and that I have the writer Jonah Lehrer and his new neuroscience book to thank for my success.

You see, during the same days that I was struggling to understand just how to stack up my stitches correctly to get a horseshoe lace pattern, I was also reading Lehrer’s How We Decide, a highly readable and really intriguing book on the neuroscience behind decision-making.  And though he mentions no knitting in his book, he does provide stunning examples of how our  brains, by comparing expectations and outcomes, can learn how to make better choices.

So I took his discussion as a general encouragement that I could make my brain learn lace. I kept retracing my stitches and studied and identified my missteps. And sure enough, the old gray matter (as Bertie Wooster would say) eventually did its job. The Wrenna is completed.

I came away from this project with a basic but sturdy sense of how to read lace charts and how to choose the correct yarn-over between different combinations of stitches.  It was both humbling and satisfying to learn these new skills.  And I’ve already put them to work in taking up an old sock project that had thwarted me in the past.  More news on these socks later this winter.  For now, they have to wait while I make decorations, and maybe even a new dress, for the Desk Set’s Biblioball.