Oh, the misery of being a newbie knitter...

This is probably very boring to experienced knitters, but it was new to me: "frog" happened to me Wednesday night. It's happened twice now. This is the first time I was trying to salvage my work instead of tearing it all back to the beginning. Just when I was feeling so smug about how I haven't lost any stitches, how hard can this be, blah blah....

So, I was working on the HP Prisoner of Azkaban scarf while watching LOST. I guess LOST was too much of a distraction - won't be knitting while watching that again - because I dropped a stitch. To make matters worse, while shuffling stitches back and forth in preparation of a Russian Join to start in with the gold yarn, I somehow ended up with another missing stitch. I'm learning a lot from making this scarf: circular knitting, Russian Joins, experimenting with ways to hold the yarn - but that night, I wanted to chuck it and just tell my husband that his scarf has joined his blanket in the abyss. I managed to pick up the dropped stitch, and was very proud of myself for having been able to do that... and then saw the missing one. I don't know what you call it - it wasn't dropped; it just wasn't there. The columns in front and in behind each had five stitches, and this one just had four. So, I thought, no problem, I'll just rip it out and fix it. Right.

First, I forgot that this is knitting, not crocheting, and it's not so simple to just rip it out. I've crocheted for over half my life, and I am accustomed to its simplicity. The difference between crochet and knit is that in crochet, the tool moves across the work; while in knit, the work moves back and forth on the tools. In crochet, if you make a mistake, you just tear out stitches until you get there and then start again. Simple (The downside, of course, is that you can't pick up dropped stitches - to my knowledge - you have to frog to make corrections). Knitting, on the other hand... if you have to frog, you have to remove the work from the needle and then try to pick up every single one of those 90 little stitches... in the right direction, without letting them drop down. Ugh. On top of it, since I am knitting in the round, I had to go down five rows to my last color change, because I didn't know where each row ended / began, and so the color change was the only row where I could tell. I didn't think to try unknitting before I rashly began pulling at the yarn. The agony. I finally managed it, and then I hid under a blanket for the rest of the night.

So, she said optimistically, I survived my first frog session in which I had to pick the stitches back up. And I learned how to pick up a single dropped stitch. But man, did it suck. :P Crochet is definitely easier in this regard.

The Gratuitous First Post

So, I started this blog because I love reading others' knit blogs and thought, why not? I don't have any friends who knit, I don't have any friends even remotely interested in knitting that I could recruit, and I can't join a face-to-face knitting group because of childcare and schedule issues. So, I'm left with the 'Net - which really isn't a bad place to be, although it would be nice to really KNOW a few knitters in the real world. Since that can't happen right now, this is a nice second option.

I have only been knitting for a few weeks, unless you count the time a few summers ago when I taught myself to knit from a book, tried to knit a scarf using an "easy" pattern from the internet, and then cast it all aside. I still have the yarn from the scarf that never was. Anyway, I decided to try knitting again for a couple of reasons. One is my son, who has recently metamorphosed into a little monkey and needs to be watched constantly. I thought that knitting would be something portable and easy to put down while spending the afternoons with him. Not like scrapbooking, which required too much concentration and mess to deal with while he is awake. The second reason I wanted to knit is because I love the Harry Potter knitwear that I've seen on the Internet, and my husband said that if I made him a Gryffindor scarf, he would wear it. He still gripes about that crocheted blanket I started for him, which is only a third of the way done and hidden beneath the bed... I thought that surely I could handle a scarf, and then maybe he'll "forget" about the blanket (I really should finish it someday...).

If I can figure out how to do it, I will post a picture of my first swatch sometime soon. Yeah, it's priceless. And, come to find out, I was knitting twisted stitches... which means that I had to frog my 65 rows of Harry Potter scarf and start over Sunday morning. But that's another post...