I’ve just realized I learned to knit three years ago this month. I’d picked up a Dummies guide in Jerome in late June, got frustrated with it, got the Stitch & Bitch book because I’d heard it was much better (it was!) and then got Rudder’s gramma to help me figure out a few things that still confused me, when we visited them in July. (This is the grandmother who just died; I wrote about her knitted dishrags, and about learning from her to make them, for her memorial service.) A lot of what I know about knitting is from books, but some of it is from her. Also, I was lucky in that learned to knit at a time when a real knitting community had formed on and offline. I like the idea of being part of a chain of knitters, and of being part of a worldwide community now.
At the grandparents’ house a couple weeks ago, Rudder’s 7-year-old first cousin once removed, that same gramma’s great-granddaughter, watched me making my blanket and asked me to teach her how to knit. I know some kids that young do learn, but we didn’t have a long time together and with so many people around and so much happening she didn’t seem to have the attention span for it. Instead I taught her to crochet on her fingers. She’s got her whole life to learn how to knit and I hope someday she does, but meanwhile I felt like I was helping to craft a chain (chainstitch, anyhow) between her and her great-grandmother.
Looking at the Summer of Socks
knitalong page has reminded me to note that the socks I’m working on are made from Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock (my favorite of the sock yarns I’ve tried so far and one I keep coming back to) in Bittersweet, knitted on size 1 Addi circs, in Knitty’s ‘vog on pattern.
I’m amazed, looking at the SoS discussion, to see that some people expect to make 6 or 10 or 12 pair of socks this summer! I’ll be lucky if I manage three. I’d also like to get something done on the half-finished shawl and sweater I have sitting around, but other knitters do stuff besides socks too. Either they have more free time than I do or they knit a lot faster, plainly. Or both.
I’ve decided to live dangerously with the current socks; I’m goint to try and see if I can get both socks from one skein. They’re quite short, only forty rows above the heel, and I seemed to have a lot of yarn left over. Unfortunately I don’t have a yarn scale (Rudder’s old chemistry scale is among the stuff in storage) so I can’t be sure. I tried making a balance by hanging the remaining yarn from one and of a hanger and the finished sock from the other, but it wasn’t really sensitive enough to tell. I also wound the remaining skein into a ball and tried to judge, when it was half wound, whether the ball I’d wound was bigger than the one I had left. But a ball of yarn on a nostepinne is bigger than one with the nostepinne removed so it was still difficult to tell. I figure I may as well try, though. At worst I’ll have to weave in a couple of extra ends, and this lace is dense enough for that not to be a big problem. And at best I get another pretty purple pair of ankle socks from the extra skein!