knitting in the dark

Sometimes I think I take knitting and all my other crafts for granted. It’s only when I see someone just starting to learn do I really appreciate the time it took my mother to teach me how to knit, needlepoint, cross-stitch, sew, and quilt (not to mention cook and bake). My mother first taught me to knit when I was about five or six years old; I think I stuck with it for about 9″ of a “scarf,” nevermind that we lived in Seattle and there was no need for scarves! I wish she had saved that little bit of blue scarf for me - or at least a picture of it!

Last summer I taught a friend how to knit and, while she enjoyed it for those first few moments, she gave up the moment someone wasn’t there to supervise. I don’t blame her - it takes a lot of time and effort to solve knitting problems on your own the first few times you encounter them. And you have to know that you really want to solve it and to get better at your craft. When she was packing up to move from NYC to Portland last month, she found the needles and yarn and the bit of knitting she had done and gave it all back to me in one piece. And before I ripped it out to rewind it onto the ball I took a photo for us to remember it by:

If I hadn’t been knitting for so long I would want to quit now because my current knitting challenge is pissing me off. I am designing a pair of socks for my father that is masculine enough that he’ll wear them, but not too boring for me to knit. In the past I’ve made him pairs that are stockinette and pairs that are ribbed, but golly do those get boring fast. He’s not cable-adverse like some people tend to be, so I thought I’d put together some stitch patterns myself and see how it goes:

I thought it was going swimmingly (I love the braided cable) until I measured the leg diameter… it’s so skinny it wouldn’t even fit my little tiny feet! So I ripped. And wow did it hurt to rip all that cabling. And I tried again…

I added 12 stiches to the needles and added some plain ribs in between cables and tried a looser braid and it will fit now, but that braided cable is SO UGLY and needs to be tighter as in the last iteration. I’m okay with the ribbing and the small cables and I will keep those features in the next installment. So I’m going to pull it all out again… but the Brown Sheep Wildfoote rips easily and is holding up nicely. Thank goodness I didn’t try this with a mohair blend or it would be a big sticky mess!

I have a couple other projects that are in need of “fixing” as well… and I’m hoping to work through their problems before I start new projects. I bought some yarn while I was in Boston for work last month and I just can’t wait to get started with it. Fortunately it’s all sock yarn and I only have one set of 2mm needles so I have to finish these socks and the Fiesta Mittens that I started in February first!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 10:46 am and is filed under knitting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.