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.

(more…)

Guess who had her first knitting class tonight?

These are the fruits of my labours thus far. Those of you who are experienced knitters are probably deeply ashamed of my horrific attempts at casting on; the photo does not do justice to the random holes that appear in the first few rows, but I got the hang of it eventually.

Can we talk about how fun it is to pick out wool? I had to fight the urge to pick something too out there as if I make something that ends up being wearable from a are-these-competent-stitches point of view, I would also like it to not be a deeply terrifying fashion statement. I played it safe and went with what Amelia calls “fashion grey”, i.e. a darker shade of grey (hexadecimal colour #555555!) that you can wear and still look fashionable, which is often defined in opposition to “Dad grey” which is a much lighter shade of grey (#CCCCCC!) and rarely looks chic. Not to say you can’t find a way to make Dad Grey work, I’m just saying it might take a special talent and a keen eye for design.