Up and running

I have now finished 2 dishcloths. The first one was supposed to be a Thanksgiving theme, with a horn of plenty and the word "thanks" above the horn. I would like to focus on the positive. Let's just say that my finished product had nice, neat borders. :-) The rest was a mess. My first effort at following a pattern didn't yield such great results. There was no horn. There were no thanks. It was a jumbled up mess of knots inside the pretty border... no rhyme or reason to the interior. Oh well. I was still thrilled to have completed something. And I managed to teach myself how to bind off, and it is now a finished piece.

Hot on the heels of that (my mumble jumble piece), I wanted to try to do a piece that could be deciphered. I picked another dishcloth, this one with a snowflake. I finished it pretty quickly, and, while not perfect, it is discernable! My 8 year old son looked at it and said "it's a snowflake"! Wow! Progress! He also asked if he could have it! How could I refuse?!

I will post pictures of these pieces soon. I need to take pics and upload them. In the meantime, I have found something that I am positively aching to make. It seems to be pretty straigtforward-- just knit a row then purl a row all the way through. I should be able to handle that, right? I fear the many changes in color though. Can I do it? hmmmmmm.... we'll see! I can't seem to post a picture of the blanket, so here is a link:

http://www.knitty.com/issuesummer05/PATTwildstripes.html

Off I go... more later

Oy vey

Well. I decided to finally take the plunge and stop practicing and work on a pattern. I am a member of a great Yahoo group, and so I decided to try out the new KAL (knit along) that was posted for the group. It is a dishtowel. Should be simple enough, right? Or not. It seems that I was inadvertently adding a stitch onto some rows by putting my yarn in the wrong place at the beginning of the row. So instead of the yarn coming from behind for a knit stitch, somehow or another it came from the front (ie, user error) and created an extra stitch in the process. How? I have NO clue. That is the hard part of knitting so far for me--- not understanding the whys and hows-- and therefore, not knowing how to fix my mistakes. I got about 10 rows in and realized I had more stitches than I was supposed to. So I was following the pattern, and finishing what it said to do for each row, but having loops left on my left needle still. So, for the umpteenth time, I scrapped my work. I plan to re-attack it this weekend. I am bound and determined to actually FINISH something!!! Wish me luck. I'll post pictures as soon as I succeed!

one step forward...

I am really trying to get the hang of knitting. More specifically, I am trying to get the hang of LIKING what I knit!!! I have this problem. I cast on, I start knitting, I get a bunch of rows done, and I look at my work and think "god, what an ugly mess!". Then I take the yarn off the needles, cut it off of the skein, and start over again. Now I realize that just "practicing" I am not setting out to make anything in particular. But I feel like I am never going to get to the point where I make something at this rate!

I bought a book off of Amazon this morning. It is called "Stich n' Bitch". It is supposed to be a great resource for learning, complete with patterns for various levels. We'll see!