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Kate gave me a ball of yarn and a set/pair of Size 10 knitting needles for Christmas this year. I’ve been wanting to learn how to knit for quite a while, and actually had asked her (since she was the only person I knew who knitted that wouldn’t involve a plane ride to see) to show me how. I’d asked her to teach me back in perhaps July though, heh, but never quite coordinated a time and place, etc.

As it turns out I didn’t actually need her to teach me after all. I loaded up knittinghelp.com and just watched the videos. This was after, of course, going out and buying a ball of cheap yarn, because I didn’t want to turn the gift yarn into a mess on the floor. I picked this nice blue variegated stuff, only to discover as I knitted my first scarf — which turned into a dishcloth when I discovered the numerous dropped stitches and other mistakes — that this nice blue actually was more like an urban camouflage, hah! I know to be careful with variagated yarn now. ;) It’s a good thing I didn’t pick up the ‘nice woodland colours’ yarn I saw… because it’d look like I was getting ready for hunting season for sure.

Well, I finally finished that first scarf, after starting over. Unfortunately with starting over I lost a significant enough bit of yardage that the scarf is a tiny bit too short, not terrible, it’s certainly long enough, but it’s not really ‘manly’ long… ahem.

I wasn’t quite ready to start in on the yarn that Kate had given me, I wanted a bit more experience first… so I ended up knitting two scarves out of this Baby Clouds yarn on size 15 needles. One was narrow and relatively short for my niece, and oh so pretty was the pink, right? My mom wanted one, so I used the rest to knit up the same… just wider and longer. I’m so proud of myself though, zero mistakes… at least none that were obvious enough for my critical eyes to notice.

I decided to give circular needles a try, this time knitting the yarn that Kate gave me, but lengthwise. I just started about two hours ago, cast on 360 stitches… yikes. I’m almost done with the second row, heh… it will take forever, damn tiny (to me) size 7 needles! I figured though, that a lot of my time is ‘wasted’ by turning the needles around from hand to hand… so instead of doing 30 stitches or so, I’d do twelve times that many… much less flipping around. This is kind of a big ‘let’s hope I got this right’ sort of a thing… that scarf should end up being 6 feet long… Twenty stitches to make four inches… 72 inches, so I need 18 of those 4″ chunks, so… 18 x 20… 360 stitches to cast on. That’s on yarn that suggests, gives gauge, of 20 stitches to 4″ of knitting… on size 7, and that’s what I’m using. I guess we’ll see… whenever I finally get that huge thing finished, heh. I just hope I end up really having enough yarn to get it wide enough. I’m still a bit in the “uhh…” mentality when it comes to estimating yardage. I did find a chart/formula that helps determine yardage, but it’s for stockinette stitch and thus far I’ve been doing exclusively garter. Either way, I think with the 210 yards on the ball of yarn I should be able to get between six and eight inches of width. I can deal with it being a bit narrow, but too short makes it unwearable.

Yay, I can knit… ! :)