How to Slip Stitch

So I just saved this tutorial from Bella Dia about how to make a slip knot.

It’s not that I haven’t made a slip knot before.  It’s that I only do it once per project most of the time, so I forget, because I rarely bother to remember details I use infrequently.  The solution is practice, but I’m certainly not going to bore myself to tears making umpteen slip knots to practice. I’d quit crochet if I had to do that.

I have a memory trick, one that makes me able to sort through large amounts of data quickly and recognize patterns.  It’s how I read over 100 pages an hour.  Fine detail passes quickly through short term memory, long enought to process, but it bypasses the long term memory stop.  I can memorize a credit card in a glance and repeat without error, but 15 seconds later all but certain salient pattern-recognition details (first 2 digits & type) are gone.  It’s hard to explain.  It’s like a savant version of photographic memory.

It’s why I love the internet for crafting.  Somebody always has a tutorial about how to do whatever I forget.  It’s like a brain online.

My refusal/inability to remember details like this is ONE reason of several why I quit knitting (and Latin).  Practicing casting on made me furious and irritable, really quite batty and occasionally tearful.  I tried.  It was painful and without joy, and I craft only for fun.  Practicing preparing to knit and not really getting to knit ever was too much.  I felt like I was back learning scales on the piano when I was 5 (I hated that too).  But you can’t very well start a project without knowing how to cast on.  So I’d forget how, have to relearn, forget, relearn … QUIT.

I only succeeded with crochet because my first project involved no chains or slip knots whatsoever.  Win some, lose some.