I had fallen in love with a sweater pattern online. I kept going back to it, read pattern notes on Ravelry. I finally decided that I could maybe make the sweater.
I purchased the yarn and the pattern and hoped I had the right needles for the project. I decided that the picture looked like the sweater might be too big, and without swatching just sort of eliminated some stitches.
The finished product looked good in photos-but I had sort of tucked back the part that flared out at the bottom, and if you looked closely I had actually added a few more rows to the collar because the original collar was too wide.
I failed because I skipped like every single step, including:
-NOT swatching, and thus checking gauge
-NOT using the needles the pattern called for
-NOT taking proper measurements to modify the pattern properly (which gave me that not awesome bell bottom on the sweater)
-NOT reading the pattern start to finish BEFORE starting the piece.
Knitting can be a meditative, rewarding practice but it takes a lot of preparation, thoughtfulness and work. There's a popular meme/quote that comes to mind when I'm looking at the frogged mess of a sad sweater: "Failure is not the opposite of success, it's part of success." I can learn from the mistakes I've made, and start again-BUT NOT AFTER SWATCHING FIRST.