The Typical Knit Spot

Day Five: Location, Location, Location -- Where do you like to indulge in your craft?


Oddly enough, it's never really occurred to me to photograph my typical knitting location before.  It's just my end of the couch, near the side table (which is now perpetually littered with patterns and small project bags) and my OttLite lamp.  Since there's also a regular lamp on the nearby table I rarely use my OttLite for knitting, but it has come in useful for some very dark/black projects.

I do have space set aside for a dedicated craft room, but it isn't decorated or organized into a craft room yet, so at this point it's mostly just a storage room.  But even when it's finished it's not likely to be my primary knitting location.  I enjoy knitting while catching up on recorded shows and I'm not planning on adding or relocating a TV to a future craft room.  In my mind the craft room will be for tidy storage and other hobbies like sewing that require a table to spread things out on.

Unlike many knitters I don't ride for my commute to work; I drive and I am generally the driver.  So I don't have daily knitting that follows me to work and most of my knitting time is after work or on the weekends at home.  But I have been known to knit on airplanes or as a passenger in the car for vacation travel, and my knitting often follows me to lengthy family functions or when we're watching football games on TV.  I don't hide my knitting, but I do have to look what I'm doing so I don't take it with me unless it's a situation that I don't have to be totally focused on.  Maybe with practice I won't have to watch my knitting so closely, but I think there might be part of my personality that wants to watch what I'm doing and not let it slip into something my hands just do to keep busy.

The Continental Finger

Day Four: A New Skill -- Is there a skill related to your hobby that you hope to learn one day?

I already touched on this a couple of days ago, but I would like to learn how to knit continental style, at least to the point of being able to do so with a secondary color for colorwork projects.

When I chose my first project with colorwork I went in search of a tutorial and printed this one.  It was well illustrated and simple and enough to help me finish my convertible mittens, although I did have to devise a way of holding the yarn in my left hand on my own.  I didn't really settle on a comfortable way to work with my left hand, but I figured I would just need practice. 

Then, with one really emphatic swing of a hammer a few months after finishing the convertible mittens, I made a seemingly permanent change to the way I hold my needles.  It's now just a couple of days shy of a year from when I clobbered my finger tip and although there isn't much of a visible injury there anymore, I still have a lump in that fingertip that can be uncomfortable when I apply pressure to it.  So even now I hold my left needle without using my left index finger.  But since most continental knitters seem to use that finger to guide the yarn, having mine programmed to stay up and out of the way of the needles might be convenient.

I'm not sure what the next step is -- Continental knitting tutorials, videos, a class -- or when I'll make a dedicated effort to improve my version of it.  I'm sure the lazy side of me will continue to hope that random practice with small projects will lead to a sudden epiphany that resolves the difference in tension between right and left hands.  Or the ambitious side might kick in eventually.  What?  It could happen.


(Where's all of that laughing coming from?)

So Many Knitters

Day Three : Write about a knitter whose work (whether because of project choice, photography, styling, scale of projects, stash, etc) you enjoy.

Even though my gut reaction is that it's a cop-out to answer that I don't have one favorite knitter, maybe being a relatively new knitter partially excuses it.  Either way, I do have a favorite knitting web site: Ravelry!  I love how easy Ravelry makes it to see so many different patterns and projects and so many different knitters' takes on the same project. 

Sometimes it's a knitter who clearly has a different style and favorite palette of colors than I do that is the one that makes my favorite version of a pattern, and without something like Ravelry to bring all of the project details together in one place I would likely never even know about their project.  After all, I'm not likely to stumble onto every random knitting blog.

It was Ravelry that introduced me to the famous sock designs by Cookie A. and then later to the totally different sock construction style of Yarnissima.  And I suspect it was probably Ravelry that led a certain Mooncalf to take a peek here, which prompted me to take a peek at her blog as well.  Now I follow her blog regularly and give her kudos for posting much more often than I/we do here.

In the end I browse Ravelry more than I search out and follow knitting blogs, so I think I'm just exposed more to projects and stash from a lot of different people rather than following the work of one specific knitter.  Ah, aggregation!

Sipalu Inspiration

Day Two: An Inspirational Pattern

Before they were discontinued I purchased a kit for the Sipalu Bag from KnitPicks.  It was just so beautiful with so many shades of colors that I couldn't resist.  Of course I'd only been knitting a little over 6 months at the time and I had other projects in mind first.  Now it's been a little over a year and I haven't found time to start my Sipalu yet, but I'm still looking forward to it.  

I'm sure my overall knitting has improved since I started, but I still don't have a lot of experience with colorwork.  I prefer to control my yarn tension by keeping my working yarn wrapped around my right index finger, but for colorwork I've been knitting with one color in each hand.  I've made it through a couple of small projects that way, but I still haven't found a reliable way to keep the yarn tensioned in my clumsy left hand.  And although I've figured it out enough for projects worked in the round, I'm not sure I could purl very well with the clumsy left hand yet either.

My latest colorwork attempt, with some tension problems

I suspect I should really practice some continental knitting and get better at it before tackling the Sipalu project, but we'll see if I get impatient and take a stab at it with my semi-clumsy style instead.  Of course now that my yarn stash has grown and I have more project ideas than time to knit them, it's a project that's probably still a ways off anyway.

The Beginnings

Day One: How and when did you begin knitting/crocheting?

It actually took me a few starts before I started knitting and didn't stop.  

Step 1
My Mom used to knit when I was young, and I think I was probably 7 or 8 when she showed me the basics enough to make a tiny blanket for one of my toy horses.  I think I patiently knit it to about 2 x 3 inches before she took it off the needles for me.  I don't remember much about the experience and for whatever reason she didn't knit much after that and so neither did I.


Step 2

Yes, the infamous eyelash yarn scarf

Then in 2004 I bought purple fun fur yarn to glue onto part of a Halloween costume.  When Halloween had passed and I still had purple fun fur staring me down, I took the yarn to my Mom and borrowed some of her needles and had her help me get started on a simple scarf.  It wasn't a good project to reintroduce me to knitting -- the fun fur obscured the stitches so that it was very hard for a new knitter to see knits or purls or even count the stitches.  I managed to keep it going until a good scarf length, but by the end I found I was somehow increasing stitches on one side with every other row or so.  Of course the good thing about not being able to see the stitches was that I just finished the scarf, folded over the crooked increased edge until the scarf looked straight, and sewed it down flat so the ends matched.  It was actually a warm and comfy scarf and I wore it a lot -- probably much more than anyone with fashion sense would approve of.  But it obviously wasn't the best project and I didn't have any knitting aspirations beyond using up the yarn I already had so it didn't go any further.

Socks On Schedule

It's been less than three weeks since the We're Not In Kansas Anymore kit arrived from Woolgirl and I've already finished my socks.  (I actually finished them this past weekend but didn't get photos of them until last night.) 

I'm proud to say that this newest pair of socks is evidence that I'm keeping up with my sock club schedule really well!  I can't claim a perfect record since: 

1. I only finished the Flying Monkey anklets from the Enchanted Forest/Flying Monkeys combo kit and the Enchanted Forest socks are still just mostly toes.
2. I have not yet gone back to the dusty rose yarn from the Ruby Slippers kit.

but I'm going to claim that 7 out of 9 is a good record.  And I'm finished with plenty of spare time before the next kit is due to arrive, so there's always a chance (even if it's slim) that I'll make some more progress before then.

Pattern: Kansas
Yarn: Mama Llama Perfect Sock - Not in Kansas Anymore
Needles: US 1½ - 2.5 mm (Signature Stiletto)
Completed: April 16, 2009

Rare Gem Socks

Before I caught a Wollmeise shop update I bought a sock kit from Yarnissima, partly under the assumption that it would be the most likely way to try out some Wollmeise yarn and partly because her patterns looked fascinating.

 

Of course, once I read a bit about it on Ravelry I found that at least some people thought the particular pattern I had chosen was one of her most complicated.  I'm not that easily daunted and I really wanted to try knitting with some Wollmeise, but I was also feeling like I'd been knitting too much for myself and was overdue for making some socks for my Mr. Wonderful.  So since I already had yarn set aside for him but hadn't settled on a pattern, I decided it was perfect timing to try out a simpler Yarnissima pattern to get used to her style of sock construction before jumping into the spina di pesce kit.

And so I made my first socks with some of my Rare Gems Mill Ends from the Once in a Blue Moon sale:

Woolgirl Oz Sock Club - We're Not In Kansas Anymore

Easter hustle and bustle delayed me, but the We're Not In Kansas Anymore kit arrived late last week and is ready for viewing now...

************ Spoilers from this point on! ************

The kit contents:

I now have so many little notions/change purse style bags that I have no idea what to do with them, but I was very pleased to see the larger project bag that was included!  There's also a sturdy travel mug, a small "What I Dreamt" notebook, a "We're not in Kansas anymore..." button attached to a keychain, and a small square pendant with a dog tag style chain.

The little button in the lower left is actually a small magnet attached to a card announcing the optional Glinda kit coming up this summer.  I'm sure it will shock the die-hard Woolgirl kit collectors, but I'll probably skip it.  I still haven't made myself go back to the pink yarn from the ruby slippers kit, so I don't really need more pink and everything in the Glinda kit is sure to be as pink as you can get.  Good for others, not good for me.

Again, I didn't get a photo of the pattern, but it has a lovely twisted stitch cuff atop an otherwise lacy sock.  It looks like the lace pattern continues into the heel and toe, but I'm not sure yet whether I'll follow that part of the pattern or modify it.

The yarn is a nice, squishy yarn from Mama Llama -- Perfect Sock, 100% Superwash Merino.  It seems to qualify as Sport weight, but it doesn't feel particularly heavy to me.  Of course, I just finished working on socks with Socks That Rock in Mediumweight, so that may have biased me a bit.

I really like that it's not a true solid brown -- my skein has sections of russet and greenish hues, so I look forward to seeing how it will knit up.

And of course there's another adorable tiny stitch marker to add to my collection.  I definitely don't use safety pins as stitch markers anymore!

Since I just finished some socks for my Mr. Wonderful (they went straight on his feet, so I don't have finished photos to share yet) and I'm struggling to make myself want to knit the Enchanted Forest socks (dark green, splitty yarn on US1 needles with lots of cables to emphasize the constant splitting), I wound this new yarn and cast on for the first sock last night.  I've barely started, but I like what I've seen of the twisted stitch pattern so far and I'm hoping the sizing works out on my Signature stiletto DPNs.

There are/were many distractions, but the sock knitting continues!