Losing Patience

Sometimes you encounter a pattern that is more trouble to make than it is worth. Usually for me these patterns look super easy and result in a really cute piece of clothing but they have all sorts of funny demands and lots of finishing work.

First, let me just say that I hate finishing work. It is the worst. If I wanted to sew I would get a lot more use out of my sewing machine and wouldn't spend hours building fabric stitch by stitch, but I knit because I like knitting and it seems efficient, if done right. I often see patterns for adorable little stuffed animals that I would love to make but I know that all of the tiny tube knitting and sewing and stuffing would kill me so I avoid them like the plague. My favorite knitted items are ones where you make a complete garment or thing and have only two strings to sew in. What a sense of glorious victory!

For a while I have had this pattern for booties that is ADORABLE. I have attempted several times to make these booties (one attempt is chronicled here)but the actual finished booties have never materialized (I have a pair laying around somewhere unfinished). After carefully attempting to finish this one completely I figured out why.



There is like, 10 strings hanging off and a bunch of seams that need to be sewed! Yuck! These things are tiny, 2 1/2 inches long maybe, and there is a ton of finishing work. Ugh! I gave up. I decided that they are more trouble than they're worth and made this instead:



This looks like more work but it's actually less. It's a baby hat, and the best part about it is when you are done there is only two strings to sew in. VICTORY!!

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.

Know-it-all Knitting Ladies

Sometimes when you go to a yarn store you encounter the Know-it-all Knitting Lady. These are the ladies who feel the need to help you out so strongly and to tell you exactly how knitting should be done even when they don't really know what they are talking about.

Went to a store recently where someone in my party asked if they had metric gauges for knitting needles. The Know-it-all Knitting Lady proceeded to tell us, forcefully, that Metric was exactly the same as US and all gauges had both on them and that Addi was the only needle that was different. Well, my compatriot and I looked at each other knowingly and quickly left the store because we both knew that the Know-it-all Lady didn't know quite as much as she thought.

In my possession right now I have a nice package of sock needles with 6 sets of needles that are labeled with both their US and Metric sizes. In US sizes the set contains exactly one set of size 0 needles, 2 sets of size 1, 2 sets of size 2, and one set of size 3. In Metric the same set contains one set each of 2.00mm, 2.25mm, 2.50mm, 2.75mm, 3.00mm, and 3.25mm. Hmmm...it seems as though they're not quite exactly the same.

The lesson to be learned from this incident is that Know-it-all Knitting Ladies don't always know it all. Trust your guts.

Adios TV

We took down our television for the summer. I think it's a good thing. I want to be more active this summer and spend less time watching mindless crap.

I worry, however, that I will do less knitting. I like knitting and watching TV. Not TV that you need to pay attention to, but crappy shows that are entertaining and there's no need to follow them or really understand what's going on. There are a lot of those currently on TV.

Maybe I'll just sleep better and get as much knitting done as before.

Flowers!

It's an early spring this year and thank heaven for that! The last two winters have been horrid. I got excited today when I looked in my flower bed and saw that the little flowers that grow there every year despite all my neglect were in bloom. I love flowers and I wish I was better at growing them, but I figure you can't be good at everything so I just enjoy them when they happen to pop up.

Happy Spring!

Don't Wait Too Long

I have a bad habit of being overconfident in my ability to remember things and this week that bad habit caused me to rip out and re-knit the same four rows about four times. Why do I always do this to myself?

Here's what happened

I'm making a pair of socks and I decided not to follow a pattern for the lovely cables but simply came up with an ingenious design myself...ahem. Ingenious until you wait four months after finishing the first sock to continue on to the next one. What did I do on the first one? Well, it's right there in front of my face but apparently my counting skills have deteriorated in the intervening four months and...re-knit four times.

Yep. My follow through skills are not so good. I read a lot of self-help crappy pop-psychology magazine articles and apparently there are people out there who are good at the elusive follow-through. That is, they can take a task and see it through to completion; make a plan and follow it. This is not my forte. I like ideas, big ideas, and I'm often overwhelmed by the details, or what I think are the details, of following through. This shows itself in every aspect of my life and, in this case, my knitting is bearing the brunt of my shortcoming. Patterns...just details...who cares...

At least there is hope. Slowly, ever so slowly, I'm improving. I have, in my old age and wisdom, learned that there is value in being exact, following the plan, and taking notes. Perhaps this will not happen again, somehow though, I think it might.

More Photos

I actually did it this time, I've recorded for posterity my grand creations.