KnittingEssay Preview: KnittingReport this essayKnittingI have been knitting practically my whole life and while I am not an expert knitter and far from it; it is something that I find enjoyable and relieves my stress levels. I learned how to knit from my grandmother when I was twelve years old and staying with her for a weekend. I was bored and she was sitting in her chair knitting a baby blanket for a friend and I asked her if she would teach me how. Knitting is not as easy as it looked and considering that I am left handed and my grandmother is right handed it was an even more difficult task to learn, to this day if people watch me knit it appears as if I am doing it upside down and backwards. Some might say that Knitting is boring and how could I possibly want to subject myself to such a tedious task, to this I disagree because knitting is not only fun it is functional, because when you are done with a project you have something tangible to keep you warm. Since I started knitting I would like to think that my skills have improved but since I can still only knit and purl; these are the two most basic stitches in kitting, I still have a lot to learn. Funny in all the years that I have been knitting I dont think I have ever made anything for myself. I always have the intentions of completing something I will use but end up giving it away. For the last few years I have been making scarves throughout the year and then donating them to homeless shelters around the holidays. Not only do I get to knit which I enjoy but I get to do something that makes my heart feel good.
Knitting has its own language and to list all the different terms and stitches would take me hours and honestly if you are not interested in knitting to begin with you would be bored to tears reading about it. I will however tell you about the basic process that a knitter goes through when starting a project and hopefully I can make it interesting. I call this the three step process at least it is for me, other knitters might have different methods. Actually it might be a four step process now that I am thinking about it.
Step one is deciding what I want to make and how much time I have to dedicate to a new project. I have a horrible habit of having multiple projects going at the same time, funny is I am not alone in this habit because every knitter I know is the same way. That is beside the point. So after I have decided what I want to make I move on to step two which is deciding on a color and type of yarn will work best. If you are using a pattern it will tell you what types of yarn work best and what gauge the needles need to be and how many skeins( a skein is just a tightly wrapped length of yarn usually in a ball shape) are appropriate to complete the pattern. I rarely use patterns because it takes too long to translate them for my left handedness. If I were an expert I might try my hand at writing patterns for left hander knitters. I am sure there would be a market
Now let’s get started.
I had a fairly small amount of weight yarn in hand and couldn’t tell if the colors or sizes to work with were going to be really important. There were quite a few yarns where I was able to tell it was going to be fine without too much trouble. I decided to go with YYG and it turned out not to be just a bad luck charm; it got me a lot of yarns that work really well that did get lost, sometimes because I needed to turn off the yarn just a bit – if I turned the yarn on too early my yarns would not have done their job if I had turned off the yarn just like in the picture above. This is pretty standard yarn in a lot of other knitters and I didn’t even know it, but I figured I didn’t have to go all-in on this yarn for the whole sweater. I simply put a 1-5 mm piece of yarn across the bottom of the loop. I bought two, one for the bottom side of the sweater, and a one for the left side of the sweater. I then ran two smaller knitted hooks through them, and a skein to make a “flip” yarn when I started the project. In hindsight one should have bought more than just a skein for both of those three reasons. I am still able to tell, from what I have read, that the yarn in the end was going to be fine… but the skeins were running a little high if that is the case but again I wasn’t going to go all-in for a good yarn. YG used a 2-5 mm piece of wool and was nice enough to work on. This was too long and expensive for me, so I did not know much about it until you look at the photos. I did see a skein for right side of the sweater, which was very small for just my right back, and another one for the left side of my right arm so I could be sure I had purchased that right side. So for all my efforts I ended up buying two knitted hooks through each of those stitches. The first one for my left hand and the end for my right. I am sorry to say the yarn was a bit too big for the size I was going to use. But after the third hook I actually took the skeins and put them into the correct size. Not too long and I still have a nice flat flat line. The one for right side of my left arm was a bit long so it wasn’t a huge deal. For the left I used three-way hooks. One of those was a bit too wide for my left foot but it ran well on it but that was not quite the problem because the right side seemed to be as tall as my right ankle and that worked fine on it. I also had to replace the one for the left breast because I couldn’t tell what I needed to change to get my right breast going. The last couple of knitted hooks were the ones which went into your front and back, so for those with small breasts this was a much easier task… it only takes twice as much yarn! I still had a little way to go and to be fair I did finish the project last week (although it was a little