Articles Tagged with “knitting”

Today I showed someone how to long-tail cast on, and I can’t help but feel like I did a good thing for the world.

I was working in the evening at the gallery, and had just taken the vacuum cleaner out. Winter is upon us, which means people track salt de-icer from the walkway onto the carpet. Vacuum every day!

As I came back to the front with the vacuum, I saw a mother…

I knit entrelac now. Entrelac is cool.

You can read the linked Wikipedia article for all the details, but entrelac is basically a knitting technique that involves working a series of rectangles (and triangles) to create a patchwork effect. Instead of knitting across all the stitches on a row, you knit back and forth across a set number of stitches (e.g., groups of 8) over and over. In the process of doing this, you create…

So, recently I blogged about my friend Cassie getting married. I gave Cassie and Marian a knitted blanket for their wedding gift (I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t spoiling this fact before I wrote this blog post!). It’s my first full-size blanket, and I am so impressed with it I’m not even going to attempt false modesty, OK?

Look at that. Gorgeous.

Prior to this I knit a baby blanket, which…

Mailing things overseas can be frustrating. Once you package everything up and send it away … you wait. And wait. And wait. And hope that your decision to go cheaper rather than faster doesn’t mean your package is now bobbing around the Atlantic Ocean, or stranded on a shipping pallet in Heathrow airport, soon to be rerouted to New Delhi instead of Norfolk. That’s how I felt when I sent two packages a month apart,…

I taught myself continental style last week, mostly on a whim.

I can say things like this, because I have become fairly proficient at knitting. See, today marks exactly three years since I learned how to knit.

Learning to knit changed my life. I never saw it coming. And since I started learning, I have never stopped.

So, why the continental style? I’m working on a second pair of Newfoundland mitts, as a request from…

For over a year now, I have been knitting a pair of socks.

I chose a sock, cuff-first, as my first foray into circular knitting. The circular knitting itself was not difficult to master. Socks themselves, though, have all sorts of … components that require careful attention to detail. This one had a pattern for the cuff, then another four-row pattern for the leg/top of the foot, and different patterns entirely for the heel flap…

So I’m knitting now.

Katie, a friend I have made among my class of teacher candidates, is an avid knitter. (Her teachables also happen to be the same as mine—math and English—how cool is that?) Eventually our conversations about her knitting culminated in an offer to teach me how to knit. I was not digging for this—the thought had honestly never crossed my mind. I used to do some very basic cross-stitching, but my…