The Blog of littleduckie

I mentioned recently that I had finally figured out how to knit in the round -- yay me!  Well, unfortunately, my circular needle broke after a week or so, and it's not one that is easily repaired.  Okay, so I found a different circular needle I had bought, and really, it was even better because it was shorter and would actually allow me to finish a project with the half-skein of yarn I had been using.  Then it broke, too!  This one can probably be fixed with a bit of glue, but my half-witted stepmonster had snipped the end off the only bottle of glue in the house, so it was all dried up.

Sigh.

Okay, so last weekend, of course, I went back to Indiana to get the rest of my things from my old apartment (among which there should be a bottle of glue, but I may have left it behind).  I had set aside several sewing, mending, and knitting projects in a "work-basket," and I brought those in from the garage last night because I had found a perfect work-basket among the things I had left behind when I left Michigan eight years ago.  It has a lid & everything!

One of my incomplete projects was a pair of knitted legwarmers that I started a very long time ago.  I last worked on them nearly a year ago.  The design was my own -- a special cast-on technique, extra stitches at each end for the seam, and a special cast-off.  I only needed to add three rows to the second piece and then cast off and do the seam.  I had carefully documented the procedure right up to . . . the special cast-off!  I can't remember how I did it.  I tried one technique, and that clearly wasn't it.  Unravel. 

I checked the Reader's Digest Knitting Handbook from which I had taken the special cast-on; it wasn't any of their recommended stitches.  LOL!  See, this is what happens when you have the attention span of a gnat and you stop a project part-way through and don't return to it for nearly a year.  Hopefully, tomorrow I'll be able to figure out how the heck I finished the first piece.

I wish I were one of those brilliant knitters who can do complicated multi-colored patterns and garments with multiple increases and decreases, because I could probably make some decent money selling stuff like that.  Hand-knitted garments can be extremely pricy!  But I just don't see that happening.  Meanwhile, it does feel good to have a piece of knitting in my hands, and it's great to have my old-fashioned work-basket sitting there just as I imagined it, with blouses with missing buttons and other such tasks right at hand when I need something to do.  And I guess that's really the point.  Even if I never knit anything impressive, I'm getting a lot of pleasure and satisfaction out of the knitting process itself.