Nov. 3, 2006 - Knittiversary?
Well, if there is such a things, it's right around now. I know I started knitting around the end of October or the beginning of November. I know because I went to a PWOC conference for 4 days in November and I saw some ladies crocheting in the evenings. I remember thinking, "Hey, I could have brought some yarn and needles and...like...knit something." Now I think if the house was on fire, I'd grab the kids and something to knit while we waited for the fire truck.
I learned how to knit when I was a little girl. My mom used to knit and crochet a lot. When I was in 7th grade she had a job hand knitting sweaters for some company. She knit non-stop for a while there. By the time I was a teenager, I had abandoned knitting and did more sewing. Right after we got married, I got the idea to knit an afgan, but I don't think I got very far, surprise surprise.
It was last year that Grace said, "I want to learn how to knit. I'm going to ask Grandma to teach me." I told she didn't need to ask Grandma, I knew how to knit. She was dubious. Probably because I couldn't remember how to cast on and you know, start knitting. I went to the library and got a kid's knitting book and it all came back to me. Both kids learned how to knit and just as quickly decided it involved too much sitting still and concentrating.
My first project was a green scarf. It's really wide because I just cast on a bunch of stitches and went nuts. I ended up giving it to Alex and making him some fingerless mittens to go with it. From there I just kept going. Knitting was so portable, so soothing, so productive.
Before knitting, I had been a jigsaw puzzle addict. When my husband was in Afghanistan in 2002, I was a wreck. I couldn't watch TV, everything made me cry or made me scared. I couldn't sleep. So in the evenings, I would listen to the Christian radio station and do puzzles. I listened to Proclaim and Ravi Zacharias and worked my puzzles and that's how I got through. I could do a 1000 piece puzzle in one night. My closet was bursting with puzzles. I had a special puzzle table in the bedroom. The problem with puzzles is what do you do with them when you finish? I have one or two that I glued and framed, but really, how many framed puzzles can you have? Most of them I gave to my mom and she worked them, then gave them to my great-aunt's retirement home.
After I started knitting, I would put my work on top of my puzzles. Bad combination. I had yarn in the puzzles and puzzle pieces in the yarn. At some point when I finished a puzzle, I just never took another one out. Grace has been asking me when I'm going to do puzzles again and the answer is "If I could just get all this knitting off my table, I'd do one."
How is it in only one year, I'm so involved in knitting? I seemed to have sucked others in, or at least enticed them into the open. Today at park, there were 5 other moms knitting. Last year, nobody was. I showed somebody how to do a 3 needle bind off today and realized that I am the one showing people how to do stuff. That is so crazy. Every time I think of buying something, I consider how much yarn I could buy instead.
And apparently the knitting universe does not want me to get all proud of myself or anything because remember those sweater sleeves?
I ripped out the sleeve that was too long, all the way back to the armhole shaping. I figured how where I'd misread the directions (It said decrease two stitches every row for 6 rows, and I did two stitches every 8 rows 6 times. So that's like an extra 40 rows.) But when I compared it to the sleeve I *thought* was right....it wasn't. I actually screwed up both sleeves, but in completely different ways. You know in Ice Age where the sloth is all proud of himself for starting the fire and he's dancing around all "I'm a geniuth! Call me Lord of the Flame!" and the mammoth says, "Hey, Lord of the Flame, your tail's on fire."
I'm a knitting geniuth!
