Casting On

Once upon a time, I wanted to learn how to knit. But distance prevented one grandmother, and temperament the other, from teaching me as a child. I've always been too shy to ask people to teach me, because it seemed as if it would require so much of their time.

Right after my 48th birthday last September, I realized that if I were ever going to learn, and become reasonably competent, the time had come to figure out how.  I was surprised to find that Santa Clara Adult Education included knitting for all abilities, including novice. I promptly signed up, and my foray into knitting began.

I really enjoyed knitting from the get go.  I still cannot figure out how something so frustrating can be so enjoyable.  I began with knitting and purling, of course. When I first made several inches of stockinette, I was thrilled by the texture of the fabric.

The class was basically a stitch 'n bitch that had two instructors there to help decode whatever tangle any of my classmates got themselves into. A lot of them were very talented. They all pitched in to educate me about the basics of knitting.

Soon I felt ready to start my first project.  This was the beginning of a lot of learning through trial and error.

I first planned to make a very simple shawl, the Tweedy Shawl pattern that is free on the Lion Brand Yarn site.  I bought a skein of their Fishermen's Wool, and some size 8 circular needles, as suggested by my instructors. I began the shawl, and quickly realized I had taken on too ambitious of a project. It wasn't that the pattern was difficult, so much as it was many columns, and very long. It was just too big of a project if I wanted the gratification of a finished object sometime in the near future. As a new knitter,  I wanted to make sure I got the reward of a finished object reasonably soon.

So after not that much Googling, I came across a pattern called The Bad Math Scarf. But the yarn for the shawl definitely was not good for a scarf, which lies against skin. In fact, none of the yarn I had seen at the local Michael's box store seemed all that soft, or pretty.  That is when I learned about what knitters refer to as LYS, for Local Yarn Stores. These are usually small local businesses.  The one nearest me is the eco-friendly Green Planet Yarn. It was there that I was initiated into the usual knitters' obsession, yarn.

I like to be as green as possible, and will talk about that in another post.

For the next 6 weeks, I struggled through my first scarf. This is when I began to learn about frogging, which is the term that knitters use for ripping apart a project to try again, or to use the yarn for another project. I got a third of the way through the scarf, and was so unhappy with the many mistakes, and how it looked, I ripped it all apart and started over.

I now know that a lot of the stitches are twisted, but it is a fairly well done scarf. My teachers actually seemed astonished at how good it is. My guess is that I tolerate fewer mistakes than the average new knitter, being very detail oriented (which is a kind way of saying obsessive).

I used the colorway Primary Red, from the Berroco Comfort line of yarn.

I think I will stop here for now.