Starting. Finishing. Middling.

So you've set up a goal.
And it is SMART.

specific

measurable

achievable

reasonable

time-limited

Do you know where you stumble?

I committed to the Circumnavigated Cardigan. I even committed to what yarn to use (with the urgent and optimistic comments from DD: "Just buy it, Mooms." )
And I swatched.
And swatched and swatched. Because, of course, I'm not doing my sweater in plain stockinette. O No! I'm going to add staggered eyelets. A ventilated sweater is a good thing when you are prone to having hot flashes.

In my swatch I even figured out how to knit the pattern backwards from the wrong side.

Then I figured out how to stagger the pattern depending on whether I was knitting on the right or wrong side within the same row. (Trust me, the pattern is just as weird and magical as it sounds.)
So I measured my circumference (Equatorial in measurements), multiplied by gauge, multiplied by inches, and cast on.

PROVISIONALLY. (Which I hadn't done before.) Cool. I learned three ways to do it, too.





And it's coming along. Slowly. But that's to be expected with projects do that have a couple of hundred stitches per row.

In the meantime a new knitter that I coach brought a bag full of not-quite-finished projects to me "for advice."
She'd done the knitting. Her kittens had tried to make holes in a couple of scarves, but I showed her how you could rearrange the yarn and get back to the original tension. (Rather like blocking, but without water!)

She mused that she seemed to have a fear of finishing. I told her she's not the only one!

What keeps you from finishing?

There are two things (among others) that slow me down in the completion phase:

1. Fear that I don't know how to do the finish work. (The kitchener stitch is "new" every time I run into it.... still.)
2. Realization that how to finish the piece is totally up to me. Fringe? Tassels? Buttons? Hooks? Frogs? Zipper? And sometimes how I'd like to finish it involves another case of not knowing how to do it.
   

This kind of fear is just not helpful. There is nothing life-threatening about finishing a scarf, pot holder or sweater. Like DD says, "Just do it." And if you don't like it, you can frog it and do something else. Or you can do a different one and jettison the first one. It's not life or death! It's life! It's knitting!

Oh, and it doesn't hurt to have a few cheerleaders nearby, no matter what.