This is my FIRST craft-related post in this blog.
And I am super excited to write about it!
For a very long time now, I have started out with a new hobby or two, dabble in it for a while...and then stop. I have never poured enough passion or commitment into anything save for learning Japanese. Period.
Knitting was / is one of those hobbies.
It was in the latter half of 2014 that I wanted to learn to knit. The goal was to knit a scarf for my best friend back then. As nobody in my family or neighbourhood circle knit, I had to look around a lot for teachers and much thankfully, found the gracious Ms. Mugdha who taught me the basic terminologies and stitches over the period of a few days. Kinda like a crash course, yes.
After learning from her, I worked on a scarf right away -- not for the friend with whom I'd to break things off, but for my mum. A few of you might know how the first project might be...so let's leave it at that, by saying that I just finished casting the project off the needles. No images for that, sadly. (...Not that sad).
However, I started off with another project for the new-born twins in the family, and knit a few colourful patches with the chunky yarn I bought from a wholesale shop. And then?
Well, I just stopped...
Fast forward to June 2018 where I dug out my knitting stash by accident.
Tried my hand at knitting again and was surprised to see how I could just resume right away. Of course, it took a few tries at Casting On, the Knit stitch and the Purl stitch, before I resumed with the patchwork-blanket, this time with a different colour.
Did I mention that I'd bought my yarn wholesale?
Yup. I sure had to spend a lot of time spinning it into a ball.
Rolled up the yarn onto a cardboard roll, and got started with my alternate K1 and P1 rows. I had fun doing it, and learnt to loosen up my knitting. YAY!
But the not-so-fun part was when I forgot what I was doing: there was a grave moment where I forgot whether I was knitting or purling...and ended up doing I don't know which.
Uh Oh #1
While I resumed knitting / purling 'cause hey, "the show must go on!" I noticed for the very first time how the row-tracker from 4 years ago said a different story than the row-tracker now on my phone's note-taking app. With that, I realised how silly I had been to calculate a simple pattern so wrongly.
So I ended up knitting 40 rows instead of 20.
Uh Oh #2
Finally, when I was done with the 40 rows, I was wondering how I could...Cast Off. The silly goose that is me totally forgot to re-learn casting off, whee!
So I checked out multiple YouTube tutorials post 23:00 on a work day and managed to pull off some monkey business -- that ended up in actually casting off my patch.
Uh Oh #3
Check out how I messed up with the RS and WS (a term I would come to know a few weeks later...):
One good thing however, is that my mistake of knitting 40 rows actually turned out to be a blessing!
Instead of knitting 2 patches of 20 rows each, I just winged it and ended up with a full patch of 40 rows. Which got messed up...
But oh well, this is all part of the learning curve that I must overcome.
Check out the blanket pattern I sketched out on my iPad!
Glad I got the Apple Pencil, else I'd end up with sketches on paper...which would go crumpled and lost.
Aaand I used the Sketches app to draw this out.
Instead of marching ahead blindly, I thought I'll sit down for a bit and carve out a map to work with. Now that the twins for whom this project was originally intended for have grown up to be big boys, I thought I might as well extend it a bit.
So now, this blanket is intended for an adult who's stopped growing taller (psst...like me). Here's hoping I will get to finish this by 2019 and not another 4 years later!
Wish me luck for getting the yellow yarn spun into shape!!