Do you remember the feeling in high school of walking into class both late and unprepared? I experienced it again last night when I walked into my knitting class. My evening had already been hectic. I had to take Rob to swim team, go to Tasha's BOCES Cosmetology open house and then head to my knitting class.
I got to knitting about 45 minutes late. This was great considering its a two hour class and I thought I'd be much later. I had also gotten all but two rows of my project done so I was feeling pretty good. BTW, don't try to knit while watching the swim team practice, the yarn sticks to your sweaty little fingers and begins to feel like razor wire.
When I walked in, I discovered we had moved on to learning to read the pattern for a very complicated lace scarf, not socks as I had thought (socks are coming later in the course). To add to my confusion, I wound up sitting next to a very nice, but very loud, woman who talked constantly as I struggled to get the stitch pattern right. I had to go deep into my own head to focus, which, after a long day, isn't really hard for me to do.
I was able to get the pattern right, although I did have to write it out stitch by stitch. The asterisks, parenthesis and small print the pattern used were making me loopy. Several people in the class agreed that this was a good technique to use.
As we wrapped things up for the night, our teacher informed us that this was an example of a badly written pattern and if we could master this, we could do anything. Our assingment is to finish our felted coin purse and to work on our lace scarf pattern. I think I might just start the scarf. I hate making samplers, they make me feel like I'm wasting my yarn.
The thing that I notice more and more is the amount of money that can be spent or saved by knitting, or any DIY project, depending on how it is approached. My yarn comes primarily from thrift stores and yard sales. The highest I've paid is $.50 per skein. In some cases I've paid much less. By the time I finish unraveling the sweater, I think I'll have the equivalent of 3-4 skeins of yarn at a total cost of $.25.
Many people in my class talk about how much they spend on yarn and its a lot more than what I'm spending. Ironically, I've frequently gotten compliments on the yarn I use. I guess there are a lot of people who buy higher quality yarn and then never do anything with it so off to the thrift store it goes!
I'm hoping to add some pictures of my projects in the next few days.
3 comments:
One of the great things about learning to knit is that you can make that silly waste of yarn sampler and then unravel it and make something more useful with the stitches you learned.
Good luck on your lacy scarf. It may be the same as the one I'm doing in my next class. :-)
Ruthie
If you put the word out you may find people will give you yarn that's been hanging around their place. I've received some nice yarn from my Mom's friends and through freecycle just because I mentioned that I was into knitting/crochet. I guess this is true with anything though.
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