Love your Blog Challenge - Community

 Have I mentioned that I'm terrible at keeping up with this blog?  As much as I love reading other people's knitting blogs and as much as I find inspiration from them all I just can not seem to manage to get that same feeling for my own.

That said, this is the perfect time for the Love Your Blog Challenge that was given to us by Kate from A Playful Day.  She is challenging us as part of her "An Inspired 2015" to fall in love with our blogs again.

This week the topic is Community.  I started knitting as a way to feel more connected to ladies in my family who knit and get in touch with a creative side that needed an outlet.  What I found was way more than that.  When I got my first ipod and discovered podcasts and that there were lots of people talking about knitting I got so excited!  Then one of them talked about this new website that was just starting called Ravelry and I knew I had to join.

Fast forward to now and Ravelry has become a part of my every day life. Trying to explain it to someone who does not know what it is can be hard to do.  You can say "it's like facebook for knitters and crocheters," but that really doesn't explain all it has to offer.

What I found in Ravelry is my knitting community.  I now live in a warm climate and knitting is not really a thing that you see people doing a lot around here.  My family members who knit are a far distance away, so if I have a question I can just go to Ravelry and someone can answer.  If I find some awesome yarn and need to gush about it to someone that will not roll their eyes at me and say "isn't that just like the one you got the other month?" I can go there and show it to others who can appreciate it.

Connecting with so many others who share my love of this craft is incredible.  They say the internet makes the world a whole lot smaller and I have to agree.  I have connected with people from Australia, Scotland, Denmark, and all over that I would never have met or connected with otherwise.

On another level, being part of this community has helped me to challenge myself in what I knit.  There is so much support from designers, other knitters, and people with just more experience that I am not afraid to knit anything.  I do tend to stay away from certain patterns for now as I have a toddler and complicated things are not what I need in my knitting right now, but I do not feel like I need to stay away from certain patterns.  People are there to support me now matter how difficult it is.

On a more personal level, there are people that I connect with on a daily basis.  Yes, mostly about knitting, but often times about struggles or troubles or general silliness and good things going on in our every day life.  It is such a wonderful thing to be able to chat with people and hopefully be able to help them and make a difference in their life as I know they have all made a difference in mine just with kind word or a personal message.

This knitting community that I have become a part of is ever changing and growing.  There is so much to explore and find and develop that every day is an exciting step on this journey.  I am looking forward to doing a better job at keeping up with the challenge and gaining inspiration to continue on the journey and hopefully inspire others in the process.

Another New Year

Okay, so I was terrible at last year's resolution so I will try to do better this year.
What I hope to accomplish by the end of January 2015? Finish my Pure. Maine mitts and get a good start on a test knit of a hat.
Let's start there and see where I get.

Goals for 2014

Over on Ravelry there was a question about resolutions for this year.  One of mine is to blog more, but I was having computer trouble with the one I most frequently use.  It was not allowing me to type.  Fortunately I discovered I can blog from my phone and add photos.  Hopefully that will help to get more posts and pictures up.


Another goal for the year is to knit socks.  Iam taking part in a KAL in the Maureen Foulds group and we are knitting her pattern, Captain Hastings.  I love it.  So far I have got about three inches done and it is going fairly slowly, but there is progress being made.  These are being made for my sister and she will love them.  They are being knit toe up and are a simple knit purl design where the rib travels around the foot and leg.  A great first sock in my opinion.


This desire to knit socks comes from another of my goals, which is to not stop knitting over the summer.  It gets warm down here and I usually stop knitting from April to September and I hate that!  I figure if I knit smaller projects that will help.  I have discovered a love for hand knit dishcloths, and my mom loves them so I created a washcloth of the month club for her.  Those will keep me knitting but socks will also be a perfect summer knit. 


One other goal I have is to knit a bunch of small warm projects for my family.  We usually go up  north for Thanksgiving and this year when we went it was so cold!  It reminded me of when I was little and grew up in Maine and I had lots of great knits from my grandmother.  I want to take a bunch of knits up and let my family pick something out.  I have a bunch of yarn that doe not have a project for it and so these will be hats.  Or I have some leftovers from larger projects and those will be something.  Just depends on how the yarn speaks to me. 


Something else I want to do is build up my yarn stash.  It is really not that big so I want to focus on adding some yarns to it.  One way I am doing this is joining a yarn club.  I signed up for the Sheepy Time Knits There and Back Again yarn club.  I am so excited about this!  It was affordable since you pay before each shipment instead of all up front, the colors are inspired by the Hobbit and I could sign up for unexpected party, which means that I would get a variety of yarns over the year (2 worsted, 2 lace, and 2 fingering) so it will boost my stash quite nicely.

New years resolution.

I'm not normally a resolution maker, but this year I resolve to knit more and keep up the blog about it.
Right now I am signed up for two KALs over on Ravelry.  Details on those tomorrow. Plus I am doing a dishcloth of the month club for my mother and am working on the January one.
Short and sweet today.

Sharing the excitement of finally learning something that has eluded me for a long time

So, as always happens, life got crazy and I stopped posting.  Instead of making a long post about what I've been up to I decided just to start talking about what I've finishd since last time I posted and do a few shorter posts about that.
However, I started this blog so that I didn't make my husband crazy with my knitting talk, and I've been holding it in since yesterday about how excited I am about what came across my twitter feed yesterday.  It was this video on how to knit with DPNs.  I have tried unsucessfully many times to learn to knit with DPNs and never been able to get it.  Something about the video though, was incredibly helpful and made it click.  I grabbed the only set of DPNs in the house and some scrap yarn and tried it out and made it work.  Couldn't have been more excited about it!  It was just a small tube of 12 stitches, but I feel like I knit a masterpiece.  I still prefer a long circular needle for a hat or socks, but learning this skill was something that really needed to happen to make me a more well-rounded knitter. 

Finished Objects

I got the scarf finished and blocked and am very happy with how it came out. The recipient should get it in the mail today so I'm excited to hear if she likes it. After that I knitted a pair of baby booties that look like Converse sneakers for my step-granddaughter. I also knit my first pair of socks! I'm so pleased to have found a pattern and method I can understand. I have tried numerous times to knit with double pointed needles and never have quite got it. These are knit on one long circular needle. Not the prettiest pair as I did them with some leftover yarn from another project, but these were great practice to learn the basics of sock construction. Can't wait to start on my first non-practice pair!

Now if only I could figure out how to organize my photos on this blog... for some reason it uploaded them in reverse order and won't let me rearrange nor mix the text in with the pictures.

Happy and sad finish

One of my friends of facebook posted a pay-it-forward 2011 idea and I loved it! It said the first 5 people to leave a comment to the status would receive a handmade gift from the poster at some time in 2011. The catch was that if you left a comment, you also had to post the idea and make handmade gifts for others. I loved this idea so I commented and posted. I only got three comments, so I decided to do a knitted project for each one of them and I didn't mind if they were time consuming ones.

I've had this gorgeous brown alpaca yarn, my first "fancy yarn" purchase (read = not an acrylic bought at Wal-mart or Michael's) and I have wanted to knit the Lace Ribbon Scarf from knitty.com with it. I had tried to make this scarf a few times, but with no success. I'd never done any lace and had a hard time keeping track of the stitches. It hibernated for about 2 years and then I just frogged what I had. Too many mistakes to keep on going.

I knit a few clapotis in the meantime and felt my knitting skills were a bit better. I also fell in love with using a spreadsheet to help me visualize and keep track of my rows and stitches, so I made one for the lace ribbon pattern. This made all the difference in the world. Studying the pattern to make the spreadsheet helped me to understand what the pattern was about. I had a few more boo-boos and bad cast ons, but eventually got it right.

I'm a super slow knitter, but I just finished the knitting on this scarf today and I'm so excited. I moved to a much warmer climate since I purchased the yarn for this and near the beginning of the project I decided it was the perfect color for one of my pay-it-forward recipients. I just have to block it this weekend and send it off. I'm both happy and sad about it. I have loved everything about this project. The yarn was so nice to work with and after a few repeats of the pattern I found the rhythm of it quite soothing. Challenging, but do-able. I'm happy to have completed it, but sad that it's done too because I don't get to work on it some more.

It would have been nice to have one more skein of the yarn to make the scarf a bit longer, but I'm hoping in the blocking it will stretch a bit.

Above is a picture of what it looked like before blocking and I'll be sure to post another picture after blocking.