Knit night!

So, I have to tell you about the knitting group that I have.  They are all fabulous, wonderful ladies and I haven't been able to see them since January because I had school on knitting night.  It should have been a crime!  Alas.  Tomorrow will be my first night back since that, yay!

When I run into snags I can always go to them and ask for help and someone is always willing to show me or help me.  I admit, I got super lucky with accidentally finding this group.  I was about to head down to my dads, an hour and a half away from me, and I stopped into this store one Thursday evening around 5.  A couple of ladies were knitting on a couch there, and there were other chairs.  I asked if I could sit down and I was told absolutely.  I pulled out some stuff that I had been working on - at this point I had only been knitting for 2 or 3 weeks.  I had read about some people who were yarn snobs and who had big problems with others using acrylic yarn.  So, though I am not usually a nervous person, I nervously asked if it was going to be a problem for me to use acrylic yarn.  I said that I had purchased it and my needles at the thrift store, but I didn't want to be shunned.  Rather than that the most fabulous woman got up and said oh here, have these and she gave me about 7 skeins of yarn - cotton, wool, some acrylics, etc.  She had apparently won them (correct me if I am wrong, my dear) and she very sweetly and graciously told me to use them well.

Since that point I became a regular at the shop on Thursday nights.  I have gotten lots of help on things that I wasn't sure how to do - knitting in the round, puff stitches, and the like.  I have to say that, aside from the fact that I was quickly obsessed with knitting and crocheting, these ladies have kept me interested and seeing their fun projects and their skill is really inspiring.  They told me how some of the things that I had done, even prior to joining, were well beyond what most beginners do.  Needless to say that was a nice ego boost.  I didn't know that some of the things I had done were hard because I had taught myself through online videos and so I didn't know what was supposed to be hard or not.

There are certainly still many, MANY things that I haven't tried or that I don't do well.  I am still scared of socks and the flap thingie or whatever.  I haven't yet tried any blouses or sweaters in large part because shifting from the main body of the piece to an arm worries me. Anything that has that type of shift from knitting in one direction to another scares me. I have only just begun to use decorative yarn overs for the baby blanket I am slowly working on.  So far they have turned out really well and the blanket is going to be super cute when I finish it.  Though I have a fingerless glove made I have not yet pulled out the knitted in waste yarn to start making the finger gusset.  I have also not mastered the skills of changing yarn colors or skeins with non-wool yarns, though I kind of make due.  There are other techniques I want to try that I just haven't found a pattern to use them on.  But, all of these things will come with time, I know.  I try to focus on one new skill at a time, become comfortable with it, and then move on to something else.  I am sure that by the end of this baby blanket I will be fine with knitting yarn overs and the particular decrease that this blanket calls for.

In each of the new skills that I learn there are plenty of mistakes.  But as soon as I realize what I was doing wrong I can generally figure out what is wrong and how to fix it.  I generally don't bother going and fixing it, for a number of reasons (in the baby blanket I am worried about the yarn overs getting lost and the decreases being too difficult to get back together) but I usually figure it out after only a few rows and then the rest of the piece is just fine.  My anal side really doesn't like the mistakes, but I am learning to accept them and, because I do learn and I don't make that same mistake again, I just accept that that is part of hand knitting.

So, even with my OCD tendencies I can accept the fact that I am a beginning knitter, that I will and do make mistakes because I then learn from those mistakes and I don't make them again.  And I really like that.  It keeps my brain functioning without having to read 3 entire books in a week, ha!