Hurray
It took me all weekend, but finally Movable Type is working and the website is (kind of) set up, and we are rocking and rolling. It started out innocently enough, but now that I am full-on obsessed with the knitting, it needs its own place. Let's face it, most of the people I know could not care less about what kind of yarn is hanging out in my stash, how annoying it is to knit a sweater on size 4 needles, or the fifteen projects I've decided to start this week. So here it is, the place.
I taught myself to knit around Christmas last year because of the Great Stocking Debacle. Everyone in my family has a hand-knit stocking with our name and a Santa and jingle bells on it. These stockings are one of my (many) favorite things about Christmas, and they rock. They are long and wide and stretchy (because, hey, they're knit!), and as long as I can remember we've been stuffing them as full as possible on Christmas Eve. They were made by a co-worker of my mom's three jobs and 24 years ago, a gift when she became pregnant with me.
So the problem is, now I have my own "family" of sorts. And while I still spend Christmas with parents mostly, I have my own house, and my own tree, and I wanted my own stocking to have here and one for my boyfriend (haha, fiance) as well. We went out to purchase stockings, and ... they all suck. They are felt, they are small, they don't stretch. We found some "knit" ones but the yarn was carried over so badly that they didn't stretch and got caught on everything. We needed good stockings. So I decided to learn to knit, and recreate our own Christmas stockings.
I taught myself entirely with the videos at KnittingHelp.com. I'm not really one to start slowly, so I pretty much practiced knit and purl stitch for an hour or so, and then launched into my first project, a tank top. And now, ten months later, I'm engaged and we're going to the future in-laws for Christmas, so we won't need stockings this year, so those aren't finished and instead I am embarking upon a dozen other ridiculous projects. One of which is a sweater, Knitty's Leo, with Debbie Bliss cotton cashmere on size 4 needles for my 6'7" fiance. I've been working on it since we got engaged (on account of the Curse, kind of) about a month ago, and I am FINALLY almost done with the back. My knitting speed has picked up quite a bit, but I still anticipate this will take several months, what with having to put it down for another project whenever my hands start to ache too badly and all.