Early Projects

Now that the introductions are out of the way, I wanted to share some of my older projects, namely the ones I knit before I started the class. I wasn't keeping track of this stuff at all while I was knitting it, so some has gone missing or been forgotten and I know next to nothing about yarn or needle sizes. Here is a good handful of things I pulled out of the depths of the closet! It's a pretty interesting view of the thing I tried to teach myself, I think.

Up there you can see my very first scarf! It's not the FIRST thing I ever knit, but close. Really simple: garter stitch all the way through. Some kind of wool, rich brown with some gold undertones. It's a bit wonky... stretched out through the middle, a snag or two, and a tail coming loose at the end. But I still wear it today! It's just so darn versatile.

At some point I started poking around Knitty.com and fell in love with quite a lot of the projects I saw there. Most of them were just too complicated for me so I window shopped. Eventually I decided to tackle this headwarmer. Not quite a hat, more than a headband. I hadn't even heard of short rows before this, but I learned them anyway!

I love alpaca yarn. Especially baby alpaca yarn. It's so freaking soft! Want to see what started this love? It was this dark red wavy ribbed scarf; another one that I still wear today. This was one of my first insights into the fact that complicated-looking patterns often aren't actually complicated (yesss!). My one complaint is that as it's stretched in length, the waves have become less apparent.

Then I started seeing thing in stores and thinking, "I could totally knit that!" Sometimes I was totally wrong. Didn't mean I didn't try! A few winters ago I found some fun cowls at the Free People store downtown. This was before the cowls were all the rage and I thought they were super interesting. And how hard could a simple tube be? Probably pretty darn easy for someone who knows which yarns and stitches make which kinds of fabrics. I didn't totally crash and burn with this one, but I never really wore it either.

One more for tonight. Another example of the complicated-looking ≠ complicated deal. I think the pattern was called something like Berry Stitch Scarf, though I haven't found it again. I knit and knit and knit on this thing and it's suuuuper long. I was just having a good time and didn't want to stop. I wear this one sometimes too, though it's honestly a bit cumbersome at times.

That's it for tonight! Coming up next: back to school knitting. I'm going to go through the projects I've made since starting my class. Yay!