Then it got really fun & I made some baby blankets and sweaters and booties and hotpads and wash cloths and snowflakes and even some elephants and monkeys. This year I'm making little purses for my nieces' birthdays.
Then I found the most perfect pattern for a purse / scripture bag that I'd like to make for my Mom for her birthday. So cute with verigated blue wool yarn that you 'felt' to make it fuzzy and more dense. BUT the pattern is KNIT.
I've seen tons of cute knit patterns before this, but I've always told myself that I don't need a new hobby until I've done all the crochet projects that I want to do. I have so many ideas for projects that I think I'll never run out. But I caved!I bought the pattern. I bought the yarn. I bought the knitting needles. I pulled out some yarn left over from an old project (a pink stuffed elefant) so that I could practice without ruining my beautiful new yarn. And I definitely needed to practice before jumping into a new hobby.
I'm so FRUSTRATED. The "Basic Stitches" instructions that came with the instructions for the purse are pretty easy to follow and I felt like I was doing it correctly, but the pictures show some perfect stitches like this:
And my results were coming out like this:
Over and over and over again. So I went to the internet and did some research and watched some videos. And over and over again, I did the stitches EXACTLY as they show it, but after 5 or 6 rows, it does not look like the picture. And all the videos and instructions show you how to do ONE row and then they end. I wanted to watch for 5 or 6 rows, so maybe I could figure out where I was going wrong.
Today I figured it out! With knitting and crochet, you turn your project around for each new row. In crochet when you do that, the basic stitches look identical from both sides, but in knitting they don't! So that's why my knitting didn't look like the pretty picture. They were knitting one stitch for one row, turning the project around and then doing a DIFFERENT stitch, turning it around and knitting the original stitch for the third row. But they didn't tell me that!
There are names for everything - my new vocabulary includes knit stitch, purl stitch, garter stitch (what I was doing over and over and over again), stockinette stitch (what I should have been doing to get the results that I wanted), and lots, lots more.
AHA!
Now I have a pretty little practice sample:
And I feel like I can actually try this purse pattern without making a mess out of the beautiful yarn and hopefully have an end product that I'll be happy to give as a birthday present.
Next Step: Practice with knitting in the round.