Advice to New Knitters

I was talking with a friend last night who is just starting out knitting; she has made several scarves and likes good materials, which is critical to making your projects look good, and it also sounds like she has good knitting buddies to guide her through the trials of dropped stitches, miscounted rows and decrease disasters. But even with all of these things in her favor she is a little nervous to try something even slightly more complicated, like a hat.

It seems that this nervousness is pretty common. I have met many a person who mastered the knit and the purl only to make use of those skills on flat long scarves. While I like a good scarf, in general, I think they are ridiculously boring to make. Plus a person only needs so many scarves and your friends and family only need so many scarves. You don't want to be the crazy scarf lady now do you?

What's the solution? Be adventurous!! Give those circular needles a try!Keep in mind that it looks way more difficult than it actually is. And if you know good knitters who can teach you how to fix mistakes you're three steps ahead.

My favorite thing about knitting is its pliable elastic nature. It's not like ceramics where if you fire something and it blows up in the kiln, you're done and it's gone. If you make a sweater and don't like it, you can rip it out and make it exactly what you want, you can even wait 7 years to rip it out and it will still look good in the end. If a pattern is funny and you don't like it, you can change it. Knitting is simple and easy to figure out, deceptively so because sometimes the easiest things will bite even the most practiced knitters but that shouldn't be a deterrent. The most fun in knitting is when you try something and it turns out more beautiful than you ever thought it would, what a sense of accomplishment! But you can't get that feeling (or that gorgeous sweater) unless you try something new. So go ahead, step outside the boundaries, jump into something and know that you are going to mess it up somewhere at some time but that it will be o.k. and you'll either fix it or no one will ever notice.