Run before you can walk

Okay, so I can't knit with four needles, but I can knit with ten, that's right, ten, needles. Count em!

I started another sweater and because I am now a Knitter and no longer a Beginner I decided to make up a pattern a leeeetle more challenging than the last one I wrote. Cue hysterical laughter. It has lace, it has decreases in the lace, it has PLEATS! I did a swatch with one pleat and it worked just fine, so I figured it would look pretty with four pleats... Of course I didn't consider how *&@$!%^& complicated that was going to be until I had done 20 cm of decreasing lace panels. Tra la la...

But look!!! It worked!!!

Of course while I was patting myself on the back for mastering pleats I noticed the row right near the beginning where I purled instead of yo p2tog right across the lace panels which pulls everything skew wiff and means it all bunches up and doesn't drape beautifully.

Yours, off to bang my head against the wall, Rachel

When do you stop being a beginner?

Having done all that cabling, and more importantly, having it work, I don't feel like such a beginner knitter any more.
I learnt to knit many many many moons ago - probably a good twenty-plus years - but I never finished anything more complex than a hat or a scarf until a couple of years ago. I started knitting after a long gap when I was pregnant with Katie but I developed carpal tunnel and had to stop. When Jess was born I hauled out my unfinished knitting and discovered that I had all the pieces of a cardigan - I just hadn't sewn it up. I have no idea why - carpal tunnel shouldn't stop you doing an hours' seaming but there you go - blame it on baby brain! (Women who have had children will understand!)
Since then I have finished heaps of things - seven or eight sweaters, a pair of baby trousers for Jess, countless hats - most of them from my own patterns (with very mixed results! Although I am still so proud of the trousers...). But I still felt like a beginner. This is very similar to motherhood...
I remember when I first started taking Katie to playgroup, when she was about 22 months old, I felt like a total fraud: all the other women were mothers, and I was just pretending. Even though at least half (oh, all right, three quarters) of them were younger than me I still felt like they were grown-ups and I was just this idiot who accidentally had a baby and had no idea what she was doing. Of course, just about everyone secretly felt like that (except for a couple of really, really irritating people who were probably prefects at school and always know everything and ... well you know the ones!). Sometime after Jess was born I stopped feeling like such a novice and fraud - still incompetent and with very little idea what I was doing, but at some point, without really noticing, I had become a Mum.
And now, I think, maybe I've become a Knitter.

So, having read, and been inspired by, David Demchuck's wonderful column on why beginners shouldn't limit themselves to garter stitch scarves, I decided to try to conquer the Everest of beginner knitters... The Sock. My mother kindly came around with a set of double point needles (because I couldn't find any of mine - I really should do just a little more housework and a little less knitting) and I hauled out the gorgeous expensive pure wool that she bought me a year ago and sat down with the wonderful visual instructions from Terri Lea Royea.

Well people, all I can say is that knitting with four needles is against the laws of physics and nature. It just can't be done. I don't care that thousands of people claim to do it regularly - they're all liars. Or else I am incredibly stupid. And I got an A+ for that shoddy essay (very odd I must say, standards at university seem to have slipped) so I can't be that dumb...

So I put aside the dpns (for 'put aside' read 'threw violently at the wall') and went back to things I know - hats!

Yup, it's been a week of hats here. I made a hat to match the purple jumper, after which Katie demanded a hat to match the cabled jumper, and then Jess had to have one just because. And because I'm bored by beanies, I've been working on variations of a hat I call Hex.

I was going to insert some photos there but they're on the camera, which is out of batteries again. I finally bought some new rechargeable batteries, but it seems they don't come charged. Who knew?

So here are two little photos, and when I get the batteries charged I'll slap some more up, along with the pattern!

Rorschach Knitting

The finished garter stitch tunic...



I don't know why we have developed this tipping-the-head-to-one-side-for-photographs thing...




Then Jess had to have a turn (as always) - Yo! Get down you crazy white baby!




The variegated wool made a rorschach blot on the front on the sweater which is kind of fun. So far we've had Rangitoto erupting, a malaysian kite, and a nuclear sub seen from the rear. The nuclear sub was the children's father, who I've been looking sideways at ever since - a nuclear sub? Where did that come from and should we be very worried?

A malaysian kite and Rangitoto (imagine the eruption) - what do you see?

Another day another collar

It's a happy day!

The collar doesn't look as bad as I thought and Katie is thrilled to bits with the whole sweater which is the important thing. I did cast off about forty rows too soon - which means that there aren't enough short rows to make a nice shape at the front, but there aren't so many rows that the sweater eats her head.




Having sorted that I went back to the purple garter stitch one. Here's what knitting with kids is like: Both of these sweaters used 4mm needles and luckily I have two pairs. At some point however, one of the kids swiped one needle and it hasn't been seen since. I think it's probably in their room somewhere but looking for a needle in there is like looking for, well, a needle in a haystack. There could be another child living in that tip and I wouldn't know! [I consider my role in life is to make other mothers feel good about their standards of housework - everyone I know can comfortably look at their houses and say, 'Well, at least it's not as bad as Rachel's!'] So I had the pink sweater on one needle, the purple sweater on one needle, and a third needle, which I guarded jealously, which I alternated between the two. But of course when you're doing short rows, you never reach the end of a row, so I had to finish the pink collar before I could go back to the purple one! (Which might partly explain casting off so soon!)
Anyway, the purple one, with its cowl neck, is now finished but the camera has run out of batteries. C'est la vie. I have enough of each yarn to make matching hats so that's the next project.

Now I have to go and eat chicken biryani - my lovely Bangladeshi friend Asma came over yesterday with a HUGE pot and we'll be living off it for a week.