Kills Me Dead

Whoever told me not to make a scarf as my first knitting project was totally right.

My friend Lisa decided to take up knitting and since receiving her supplies by mail last week has already knit about four thousand different awesome things. I, on the other hand, am slowly slogging through this terrible monstrosity of a scarf.

Like with most things I don’t know how to do, I started out more ambitious than my skills would allow when my class started three weeks ago. I decided that since I could read a pattern, obviously I should attempt a pattern. I chose this one from the Martha Stewart website because it looked fairly straightforward. Naturally, I managed to screw it up by adding a zillion extra loops as I went row by row; you cast on thirty-two stitches at the start and after I had done about ten inches worth of knitting, I had something like fifty-eight stitches. Whoops! Ripped the whole thing out, started fresh.

But, naturally, I decided to get more ambitious. Although I’d colossally screwed up the Martha scarf, in my mind I’d somehow mastered the basic principles that she wanted you to learn, ergo I was free to move on to something else. This time around I decided to keep her idea of using garter stitches for the borders but decided to go free style in the middle portion. First I did about three inches of basket weave. Then I did three inches of seed stitch. Then I did three inches upon three inches of random patterns I found online in an attempt to both grow my skills and also stave off the boredom I was developing every three inches. In between each chunk of pattern I just did another four rows of garter stitch to break things up.

It’s hard to really see the patterns, in part beacuse I’m just not that good and don’t pay as much attention as I should and in part because apparently it’s incredibly difficult to actually see stitch patterns on dark wool. (The more you know.) I should cut myself some slack.

At any rate, I now spend inordinate amounts of time going through the knitting tag on StumbleUpon and Ravelry trying to find awesome things to make. I have got it into my head that I will make socks next as a) one should learn to knit in the round, and b) knitted socks are something I will actually wear, as there are few things in life that I love more than hand-knitted socks. My mom always buys me a couple of pairs every year from the various church Christmas bazaars, but in recent years I feel like the old ladies who make these things have an increased fuzziness on what the shape of the human foot looks like. I must rectify this for myself.