June 13, 2011
me, knitting?
Well last week I would have told you that I don’t knit, have no interest in learning ect. Well I do not know what changed. I went with my mom to her knotting group just to get out of the house for a couple of hours, she said I could come even though I don’t knit.
Well I hung out for a while talked about knitting, which is interesting since I know very little about it. Looked at some of the baby hats they were making (this group knits a lot for charity). One of their projects is to knit baby hats for newborns at the hospital. The ladies said it was easy.
But, they all knit with the throwing method. And I have said to myself in the past that if I was going to learn it would be continental. Some of the ladies said they could do the knit stitch in continental but not the pearl. My mom (who knits) tried to knit continental and also had a lot of trouble with pearling. Well I decided to try to learn. And since I did not have anyone to show me I went to the internet and watched a video on youtube.
I looked around the studio to see if I had anything I could practice with, I found a couple of size 2 double points and a skein of mercerized cotton yarn. I watched the videos a couple of time and started to knit. It was not that hard, so after a while I thought ok now on to pearling. Well that was a little trickier but I did finally get it. Wow now I was knitting:) So I practiced a little longer and I remember someone saying that you started the little baby hats with ribbing. It seems they said ribbing was knit 2, pearls 2. So I tried that, it worked, I was well on my way. So I practiced a little more and then decided if I was going to knit I wanted to make something not just practice.
So Ii brought my sample to my moms to show her what I learned and ask if she thought I could make a baby hat. She comented on my sample saying that my needles were really to small for my yarn and that my yarn was not the easiest to work with but it seems I still did a good job as my stitches were fairly even. She said I pretty much knew enough to start a baby hat. She loaned me some size 4 needles (they were huge compares to what I practiced with) and some yarn.
I cast on the required amount of stitches and started to knit. After the ribbing was done she told me to just knit until the hat was about 5 inches tall. Well knowing that I pearl better than I knit I asked if I could pearl the hat, she sad it did not really matter. So I knit and I knit and I knit. This was supposed to be something that I only did while watching TV but I wanted to learn how to finish so I got to the point of decreasing and I had to stop. You see I do not know how to do that yet.
After work today I will go to my moms to close up and finish my first baby hat. While I have no intention of becoming an accomplished knitter, and I need another hobby like I need a hole in the head, I think i will enjoy knitting these little hats. It is pretty mindless, you do not need a lot of light so I can work on them at night in front of the TV, and as a bonus they are for charity.
Pictures to follow.
Jennifer
jennifer wiles 