My first knitting project
by Karrde on Feb.21, 2011, under Hobbies, Knitting
You’d probably ask yourself what a 35 year old male is doing knitting, but I have my reasons. The only other needle point I’ve ever done is counted cross stitch, so this was a totally new realm for me. My father was a crocheter in his past, but I never picked up that hobby.
Like most I started with the basic tools, circular needles and a skein of yarn. Being the age of the internet though I didn’t have to wait and find someone to teach me, I just asked YouTube to show me. Searching on “how to knit a scarf” turned up a nice series of videos by knitpicks. The initial video assumed you knew all the pieces of knitting and just put them together. But searching though their video list turned up tutorials on all of the pieces.
Unfortunately even with this assistance I wasn’t doing to well. My turns were a disaster, I was picking up weird stitches, and dropping others. The cord from the needle was constantly in my way and I was struggling with tension. But I pressed on, knowing this was something new, and that it would take practice. I worked on it a little every night, hoping to get better, but even better was eluding me. Thankfully I had hope, my very own Knitti-wan Kenobi. I managed to get up with her, and watched as she gave me a clean row. She watched me a bit and gave me pointers and ideas.
With Tanya’s help I turned the corner on my edges, and my overall work. I was much more pleased with what I was doing, but all was not perfect yet. At this point I was 66 stitches wide, which is exactly where I need to be for my eventual project, but my needles were too short. The loops would fall down to the cord in between, and while that wasn’t a problem getting them back off was. Seems that the beginners needles didn’t have the best joint and the tension in my stitches would bind on the joint. As I said before though the loop was constantly in my way, so new tools were needed.
So off to the store I go. My intention was just to get a set of straight needles similar to what I had. Straight needles seemed to come in two sizes, regular (9″) and large (14″?). I figured regular would suit me fine, but they were out of my size. Just right next to them were bamboo needles. I had read that they would help to avoid splitting the threads of the yarn, which I had a problem with. The price wasn’t that different and I had a good coupon anyway. I got home, finished the row and started on the new needles. Bamboo has it’s quirks as well, but it was working for me. The only thing is that they are probably still just a tad short. I’ll probably get the large needles before I move on to the final project.
If you ask Lisa if she can knit, her answer is always the same. “I know how to knit, I don’t know how to stop”, hence she doesn’t knit. Reasonable I guess. She learned a long time ago and never picked up the knack, so back to the internet. I watched the video and said some words I probably should have “That looks theoretically easy”. My tension would get in the way again. Pulling one loop over the other, seemed to be a struggle, but I eventually worked my way down the line.
So now I have a finished piece. It definitely started out ugly, but by the time I decided to finish it I had worked out the kinks. I have a lot of work ahead of me, and the final project is a beast. Based on how fast I was doing rows here, the final project will take me close to 122 hours … 5 days of knitting. What’s crazier is I might do more than one…
I’ve moved on to a second project, have to work on changing colors without screwing things up. I’ll post again with the results of that.
