The Daughter’s scarf and a pretty maple yarn cozy.

At the age of 60 I decided to learn to knit – a fun creative hobby wherein I can make fuzzy fabric designs for myself and others.

Excited with my new hobby plans, I took a couple of private lessons and learned that this firmly left handed person can, with a few style modifications, knit right handed from regular patterns.

Well, sort of. 

I was pretty slow at first, but only a year and a half later, I successfully knitted my first project, a beautiful sampler scarf for my daughter.

Now I could buy more yarn and knit again!

I started a scarf for Son of Spoon Mage™, and a pretty shawl for myself. It is so fun to be able to make one Christmas gift per year… maybe this year I’ll get a little faster.

Son of Spoon Mage Scarf

This is my son’s scarf after six months of work. I guess it’s not quite long enough. It got kind of stuck because of some health issues for me and some other things that delayed the whole knitting thing. Excuses, excuses.

So, I joined a Gang of Knitters that meet every Sunday at a Starbucks and started a project to be made for me, a gorgeous shawl that was going to be so easy to make. It’s just stockinette. No problem!

Well, not just stockinette. Also a thing called a slipped stitch edging, two different yarns, one incredibly thin and fuzzy, and in some rows, you knit with two types of yarn while others you knit only with one, the whole is done on a new prize of mine called circular needles. Oh dear.

Now this project did not go gangbusters right at first, but I was determined to begin. So I set the son’s scarf aside and spent days reviewing videos on how to cast on followed by many not so successful attempts to follow the oh so easy procedures. I did make a few unpleasant sounds when my perfectionist self did not like the results of said casting upon. Repeat. Tear out. Repeat….. One day I was reasonably pleased with my casting on, or perhaps simply ready to accept whatever it looked like.

slipped stitch edging

So I began the shawl. The double yarn work is really easy. Handling the teensy tiny yarn is not quite as easy. It took a while to get the concept of why one does a slipped stitch and what it is supposed to look like. Here’s a pic of the edge so far. The edge to the left is curled up a bit so it looks different, but it is just like the other part, I swear! You can see the teensy tiny yarn rows in the middle.

On the project edge I did not photograph, I’ve marked one spot with some of those nifty clips that keep things from unraveling and will tack the dropped stitch down after blocking. Oh dear.

It’s all about confidence! And so I knitted on. As I approached the next section where I work two rows only with the super fine nearly invisible yet fluffy yarn, I realized I had done it again. I dropped a stitch. Only this time it was not conveniently in a location where I did not have to worry about anyone seeing it… and it was three rows down.

I worked and worked to correct this. I watched videos and worked some more. I watched other videos and finally decided that perhaps this was beyond me and besides, the yarn had gotten quite stretchy. So….. I started pulling it out – neglecting to recall that I had not put in a lifeline. No. I did not take a pic.

So, I took the entire thing to the place I had learned to knit. There the lovely and very understanding woman helped me undo the damage, her confident voice and compliments on the rest of my work encouraged me to keep on knitting. I can do this thing… well except for that dropped slipped stitch.

Energized, I knitted on… just a little too fast.

Oh dear. I am very much afraid that I neglected to pause, breathe, and slow down a bit. As necessary a thing to knitting as it is to cooking.

Do any of you knit? I do seem to have a small problem… but I think I can fix it with a video and a nice bit of breathing.