As Billy Joel says in You’re Only Human, “You’re not the only one who’s made mistakes, but they’re the only things that you can truly call your own.”
Everybody makes mistakes. Unfortunately, as a culture, we tend to spend a lot of time looking for someone else to blame instead of just owning our mistakes, learning from them, and moving forward.
This is the result of a mistake I made last week while crocheting. I’ve been working on a series of “Duplo” bricks – rectangles with bobble stitches in a two by three pattern. I was super excited about it, since yellow was the last color before I started assembling my various pieces. Then I reached for this piece, already tied off, and realized that I had left off a pair of bobble stitches. Whoops! I grabbed the yellow yarn again and made a replacement, which is easy enough when I’m crocheting something small.
But that left me with a crocheted brick that had no purpose, a waste of yarn if you will. It’s too small to take apart and reuse, particularly knowing that I’d be a little short on yarn for assembling a brick.
I initially flung it to the cats to play with, and they weren’t particularly interested in it. Then I realized I could improve on my mistake by folding it over, filling it with catnip, and crocheting it shut. I’ve seen three of the four cats playing with it, so I’d say that solution worked.
Be creative, if it’s an option, and turn your mistakes into something that makes you smile.
In January, Casa de Jade opened a small section in their shop offering jade carving lessons. The basic two-hour lesson gives participants the opportunity to select a piece of jade from a variety of colors (lavender, black, and light blue are only available in jadeite; the jade found in China is nephrite). A couple pencil scratches later, your stone is ready to shape in a scary-looking saw that uses diamond dust to cut the jade. Our instructor placed her fingers on the running blade – without a problem, as it’s specially designed for rock. When you have the basic shape cut, another machine is used to refine the shape by smoothing the edges and adding curves as desired. (The saw only does straight lines.)
The standard choices for the two-hour lesson are a pendant, keychain, bracelet, or magnet. The instructor worked with each participant to determine which stones needed holes and drilled those before the final round of polishing, then threated the pieces with a synthetic plastic at the end. The one magnet in the group was affixed with a mix from two tubes after engraving, with a warning that one of the tubes smelled like fish. 
