Knitting Firsts: Part 1 - Knitting Class

The past month (or so, I’ve been lax in posting all the things) has been a month of a lot of knitting firsts for me and I thought I’d share them with you. Because I got long winded, I’m going to do these as a series of posts.

So…we shall begin with…

The First First: Knitting Class (and tangentially … sock)

Because I’m the sort of person who thinks to herself “but why shouldn’t I do it the most awesome and hard way possible on the first try instead of easing into a thing”, I decided that for the femme Fifth Doctor costume I’m working on for a con upcoming in July (and then another one in August and then office Halloween in October) I should not only knit a vest (which is done and I really need to post photos of it but haven’t) which is easy and I KNOW how to do and will be nbd, and sew a skirt which is using a pattern I’ve already sewn and love and is also nbd, I should also knit myself socks. Knee high socks. Knee high T.A.R.D.I.Socks. I made this decision at the end of April and then told myself that before I could cast on said knee high socks I had to finish the mittens of repeated epic fail (more to come once that situation sorts itself out) and also my SO’s cardigan. Which, as previously discussed, took me until the middle of May. So I somehow decided that between May 15 and July 3 I would finish the half completed vest, sew a skirt, also knit another sweater that I wanted to make for a trip I have on July 9, and knit knee high socks that by all reports take experienced sock knitters months to years to do because they are SO DAMN ENORMOUS. Oh, and did I mention I’ve never knit a sock before in my life and while I conceptually understand that socks have heels and toes and legs and feet I don’t have a clue about how to adjust that to fit my actual heel or toe or leg or foot? Did I also mention that these socks are toe up and leave most of the adjusting to the knitter? They are.

Which brings me to my first first … my first knitting class. In a timely fashion, my LYS sent me an email that they were having a “knit a sock” class for the first two weeks of May. I’d never taken a class there before, but I learned to sew by taking classes so I figured what harm could it do. Granted this was a cuff down sock on two circular needles using worsted weight yarn and not a toe up sock with patterning and self-adjusting on 4 dpns, but at least I could understand the basics of sock mechanics. Hopefully. The short answer was, I found the people in the class not that awesome (much discussion that made me cringe at the levels of fail on various levels) and the teacher was distracted at best and almost no one but me actually made any progress or seemed to understand knitting in the round, but the materials I received and the comprehensive instructions on how to figure out what size your feet were and how the parts of the sock went together accordingly were hugely helpful. And at the end of it all I had a sock. Just one, but a sock no less. I want the cuff to be longer, but I ran out of time, so I’ll probably end up ripping it out and making it taller ( which can wait until closer to winter because worsted weight wool socks in the summer are just … no), but I have a sock.



So there you have it. My first class and my first very plain, very boring, ultimately well fitting sock.

Mitten HO

Since I’ve been stuck working at home due to further horrible weather, and since I’ve apparently gotten myself deep into the forest that is knitting podcasts, I’ve decided to do like four projects at once. This is significant, as I'm very much a monogamous knitter, generally speaking.

This, combined with me being inspired to use up my stash yarn in a somewhat methodical fashion (because I do everything in a methodical fashion) and start with what’s been sitting around the longest, has led to me making mittens over the last two days. Or, rather, A mitten.



This is a modified version of a pattern that’s supposedly inspired by Bella’s mittens in one of the Twilight movies. I wouldn’t know, as I haven’t actually seen these films. I just thought the antler cable pattern was pretty fantastic. The mitten is a pastel green that is far less minty green than this. It calls for a bulky weight yarn (the original pattern calls for about 200yds/180m, but I only had 120yds/110m of yarn, so I shortened the cuff). I had a skein of Paton’s Beehive Baby Chunky laying around left over from a bunting I made for a friend’s baby (who is probably 3 years old by now, so the yarn’s been languishing in the drawer for a while). The colourway is called “quicker clover” whatever that means. It’s a nice light green that’s not quite mint, so take that as you will.

I’ll post another photo whenever I have a second mitten. I want to try to finish it by Sunday to have another thing to enter into Ravellenic Winter Games 2014, but I’m having “second mitten syndrome” as it were and I’m trying to muster the Can to cast on for the second one. I worked the whole thing on DPNs and while I actually like knitting on DPNs, unlike many, I will admit that they do have a tendency to get horridly in the way of one another at points and aren’t the best when you’re trying to cable front and then cable back on the same DPN.