Knitting

I just love knitting. :)

I've been loading stuff onto my "notebook" on Ravelry lately (look for me as Mom2Ts)---library, queue (yiiiiiiii--I should live so long!), stash (hardly started--I wonder if there's a Ravelry group for people with unreasonably large stashes)--and it's been fun to sort of get back in touch with my stuff.

I've also been looking through magazines where I have things marked to see if I can find a pattern for a sweater I can wear to work and for which I also already have yarn to make it.

And I got my Adrienne Vittadini book and a Rowan book which had a ton of patterns that I'm not sure you could substitute yarns for, but boy they had some nice ones. Plus the first issue of the subscription to Vogue my sister gave me for Christmas came.

So as you can see, I've been wallowing.

I'm within a couple of inches of finishing the 2nd tube sock, unless I decide to make them longer--we'll see.

But I broke down and cast on for a new project. While I was looking through magazines last night, I found a pattern in Knitters Fall 1997 (um, no, I never throw knitting magazines away--it's amazing how often I'll go back after several years and find something I really like which I barely even glanced at when the magazine originally came) based on Elizabeth Zimmerman's "rib warmer" pattern. Since I decided last year that I would like to have a simple vest to wear with jeans and a white t-shirt, and I wanted it to be red, and I have a red-mix worsted that came as part of a Cherry Tree Hill grab bag, I thought "aHA!"

Since it's all garter stitch, I've made a commitment to do the whole thing continental style. I'm a self-taught knitter, and I handle the yarn with my right hand when I knit (I do long rows of purl with my left hand--go figure). There's nothing wrong with my knitting, but I'd like to knit *faster*--so I can make more things! *lol* And continental is supposed to be faster.

It was interesting last night. I kept reminding myself how awkward I was when I was first learning to knit with my right hand. At the moment I feel like I have very little control over the yarn, and I can't imagine knitting socks this way! I keep experimenting with ways of winding the yarn around my fingers. Right now two wraps around my little finger seems to work best, but it could use some fine-tuning.

I think I might look for some videos online--I've seen lots of stills, but I think it would help to see it in action.

For now, though, I have to take the Ts out to play before their pen thaws out into a mudhole.