Tuesday, January 29, 2008

not joining YA

Hi! My name is Susan and I’m a yarnaholic! Or at least I thought I was until I saw some extensive yarn stashes on Ravelry.com and Flickr.com. I’m somewhat relieved to see that I really am not a candidate for YA. Yeh, but isn't denial the first sign of...whatever!

Sock knitting has gotten in the way of, well, real life. That doesn’t mean I’m a yarnaholic. Tax preparations swamp my desk, but until I can't see my laptop screen that’s not a problem. Yesterday two more knitting books arrived from Amazon, I'm sure that's not a sign of .... Anyway, I knit my first sock in the last week and I documented it’s progress for my Mom. She was my measure for knitting abilities as she had been a knitting instructor decades ago and she was not surprised by my sock pictures. For years I thought I was incapable of knitting socks. I found proof of that in my archival yarn stash (in your what?). Two skeins of teal blue sportweight yarn that I bought 20 years ago and had cast on stitches on a set of double-pointed needles and then abandoned it. I just didn’t get it.





Socks are a revelation to me now! One, two skeins of some hand-dyed yarn and you're ready to go! Right? Not exactly. You need three more sets of double-pointed bamboo needles or at least I did. And you need new stitch holders and then markers too. Next came Ann Budd’s book Getting Started Knitting Socks to bolster my confidence. (What obsessive behavior?) Finally I’d run out of things to buy to launch the socks. I had to actually start knitting the socks, though not without consulting a knittinghelp video for the new method of casting on required! My lovely skeins of Koigu KPPPM #100 are now my first sock (and probably the second sock). I’m intrigued by how you shape a sock and the possibilities for design seem endless. Not to mention the really cool yarn one will have to buy for all those endless designs! Oh no I’m not a …