1.23.2008

A long post about Knitting and Crocheting

Something's wrong with my computer. It keeps shutting down on its own immediately after Startup. Consulting the brain trust to see what my next step should be, but for now my laptop's MIA, presumed dead.

My HOE fob's almost done! Just a tiny bit of backstitching left, then beading and putting it together.

I recently (like last week) signed up for Ravelry. If you knit or crochet and aren't on Ravelry, what are you waiting for? And if you're a programmer with more free time than I have, could you please create a Ravelry for cross stitchers? The "Stash" feature alone would save me hundreds of dollars at my LNS.

The reason I mention Ravelry is, I've been looking for patterns for the HSKS4 swap. Part of the swap is creating a knitting bag for your partner, to hold all the goodies you're sending and the WIP as she or he makes her or his socks. After waaay too much deliberation, but really there were just too many options, I picked the pattern and hit up Michaels on my way home from work. The exact yarn I wanted to use was on sale, so now I *might* make my budget :-)

It's weird to be blogging about knitting, because my focus has always been cross stitch, but really I've been a knitter longer than a cross stitcher, and I've both knit and crochet more than I've cross stitched. I started knitting when I was 10 years old. I was going to spend the summer with my maternal grandparents at a bungalow colony in the Catskills, and I wanted to sit in the circle with my Grandma and the other ladies and knit with them. Well that January or February (c'mon, I was 10 but I remember it was cold out) they came over to our house and Grandma F taught me how to knit. My first projects were simple rectangles, but they were blankets for my toy horses so I loved making them. Not to be left out, my Grandma E made me a horse-blanket too - seed stitch with a crocheted edging, through which she ran a sparkly silver ribbon. I loved it. Forget the sparkly ribbon (which I also LOVED), I fell in love with seed stitch. I lay so... flat. And even. Moving on...

Grandma F and I knit a sweater vest for each of my 2 brothers that summer. She was a much faster knitter, so we'd work for a bit and then swap projects, so that they'd work up more evenly. That was also the summer I learned about 20 words of Yiddish. Fun times! Grandma and I would later go on to collaborate in stitching Tallis and Tefillin bags for each of my brothers for their Bar Mitzvahs. I'll see if I can snap some photos for you guys, they're pretty.

I knit on and off until high school, when I started knitting all the time. I had an hour long bus ride... plenty of time to knit. Then Grandma E decided I needed to learn to crochet also. I think she was annoyed that Grandma F taught me continental knitting (the one where you hold the yarn the correct way, in your non-dominant hand). All of a sudden I had my best guy friend (who was on the bus with me) trying to help me decipher the incomprehensible abbreviations in crocheting patterns - lol. Btw, I'm now really good at reading and executing crochet patterns, so thanks Ben!

Over the years I've knitted and crocheted lots of different things... afghans, ties, hats, scarves, mittens, shawls, pillows, doilies, a kipah, a bandage (in ecuador when we didn't have an ace bandage handy :), stuffed toys... and other things I can't think of just now. Recently I knit that wine cozy, I'm working on my first pair of socks, I learned how to felt stuff, and a few months ago I knit myself an afghan. And since you were so patient and read all the way through my second uber-long post in 2 days, your reward is some stitchy pics - hooray!



My most recent afghan


The wine cozy


My doily WIP

Ok, off to work on that scissor fob. Ttys!

4 comments:

mercy said...

How long were you in Ecuador? I've been there once but would love to go back with my mom, I think she'd make it more fun (she's ecuadorian from Manta) I so wish I could learn to knit, it's something my cousin and I want to learn but she doesn't have the money to take a class (she's a broke student LOL) and I don't have the time to it since I work nights :-(
PS - Love the wine cozy :-)

AngelSan said...

Dunno about Ravelry for cross Stitch... We crosStitchers keep those kind of infos in our blogs. Wish lists, stash, etc...
It would be a pain to make and maintain !
I guess we just want to spend our free time stitching... and not taking pictures of stash to put on the web (we all have too much ;)

I love crochet, and make quite a lot of stuff, but I hate knitting... it's so boring ! And last time I tried I got muscle pain in my side !!!!

Anna van Schurman said...

That afghan is lovely!

Dawn T. said...

Ooo...I love the afghan you did!! I had to smile because reading crochet patterns are a whole language itself! LOL