Monday, September 24, 2012

Knitting is the new yoga

 I love to knit.

 It's one of my favorite activities, and it's so soothing and wonderful (unless you are a beginner. Then it's a bit more stressful). It's portable! I love to be able to just grab my current project and go to a coffee shop with it and just knit and knit, all the while thinking and thinking. And I'm actually quite lucky, because, what with all the knitting websites and things (my favorite's Ravelry!) you can find the most adorable patterns.

 I just have a bit of a problem.... I have horrible project ADD. I'm not kidding! And it's not just with knitting. I have so many half finished projects that sometimes my mom has to tell me to finish one or two before I start the next one. However, luckily for you, I do sometimes finish a project, so I can proudly present to you a few of my successful knitting endeavors!

Yay!!!! Gloves!!!!!

 I am sooooo happy with how these gloves turned out. The beautiful pattern is from a book we found at Half-Price Books in Seattle (my favorite store EVER!!!!), called Knitting New Mittens and Gloves, written by Robin Melanson. It's a wonderful book with lots of easy (and some very difficult) patterns. WHY I chose to start out with gloves instead of mittens, I will never know. Definitely not my smartest move. I did mess up a couple of times, but my worst mistake was on the right thumb, if you look at it, it is definitely not as pretty as the left thumb. Oh well, lesson learned (that lesson being, don't get too cocky after the first glove and think you can do something without looking at the pattern... whoops....).


  These were my first pair of socks ever, Kyra and I both took a sock class at our favorite yarn store to learn how to make them. They aren't two at a time socks, however, so one sock is slightly bigger than the other.... but that doesn't matter! They are still the comfiest socks I own.




Our neighbors just had a baby girl, so we made them a little gift basket, along with some knitted items from both Kyra and I. I made the little fair isle hat, and had quite a bit of fun doing it, since I didn't have any pattern and I love doing fair isle. I was pretty happy with how the pom-pom turned out, since my first attempt at a pom-pom was.... less than stellar. Kyra made the adorable gray baby booties from a free pattern from Michael's. I also made some of the cutest little baby socks ever, but apparently I didn't take pictures of them. They were made out of pretty purple yarn from our stash, but I'm not actually sure what kind of yarn it was... so we told our neighbors that they might come out of the dryer felted and the size of Barbie socks. :)

 I didn't actually make this adorable little giraffe, but my beautiful friend Kenzie (in the picture) crocheted it for me. Seriously, the cutest thing ever. Kyra named it Giraffamo, a name which I started out hating and I have now accepted as his name (happy, Kyra???).

 I hope to soon start knitting sweaters and cardigans, something I have looked forward to since learning to knit. I'm betting, though, that those projects might turn into year-long projects If I start one. :)

 One thing I love about living in Montana is that whatever you knit, you get to wear for at least 8 months out of the year! It's fantastic! Besides, cold weather is the perfect knitting weather, when it's too hot it's kind of hard to knit, seeing as your hands get sweaty and it makes the yarn really hard to work with. So, another reason to like the winter, also. :)

 I have knitted many more things than that, and will knit many more in the future, but those are for another post. :)

 Until then,

 Happy knitting!

Maddy

P.S.
If you have a Ravelry, go friend me! The link to my page is to the right, below all the blogs I follow.

1 comment:

  1. Your gloves turned out really nice! I happen to think that it was a wonderful idea to start out with a bit harder project. It makes mittens seem like a piece of cake, and you learn more along the way with a harder project. That's my philosophy. :)

    ReplyDelete