Happy Blogiversary to Me!
It's been 5 years since I've been doing this! That's crazy!
In honor of this anniversary I'm doing the 10 things meme that Claudia and others have done. Let's see if I actually manage to come up with 10 things I haven't said over the course of 5 years and over 500 posts!
In no order whatsoever:
- I'm considered a Knitting Drill Sergeant by my customers at work. I'm the one who says "that gauge swatch isn't big enough, knit a few more rows!" or "You can't leave that mistake in there, want me to rip down for you?" In my opinion, if I don't say it, no one will, and then when the project's done and the person's not happy with it I feel like it's my fault. So this is how I handle it now. I've also been known to (lightly) slap people's hands when I catch them "smoothing" their knitting to measure it longer. I might even sometimes say "Who's gonna smooth it while you're wearing it?" I think maybe I deserve my nickname.
- I love mindless knitting and stockinette. I so often read complaints on blogs that something's too boring to finish because it's all stockinette and I think, "Really? Stockinette is so fun and mindless!" I knit easy stuff while reading blogs and email, and complicated stuff while watching TV.
- Since college my weight has fluctuated about 40 lbs (not on purpose in either direction!) and so therefore I have lots of sweaters that don't fit anymore. I gave away all the clothes that don't fit, but I can't give away the sweaters. I feel very guilty about this stack of unwearable sweaters. As a result I've taken drastic measures, including sewing a seam down the center front and center back of one. I'll post pictures if/when it works. I figure if I ruin it I'll throw it out and feel less guilty than I did when it was just sitting in the closet!
- After 2 years of writing custom patterns practically everyday for my customers, I can now knit practically anything from a picture. I am still amazed that I can do it, and it makes me feel a little giddy every time something turns out well. At the same time I feel kind of sad, because I used to get so excited to see new knitting magazines and pattern books and now they don't excite me nearly as much!
- There used to a huge gap between what I wanted to wear and what I wanted to knit, which is why I was always making projects that never got worn. I still knit to knit and not to have a sweater, but the gap has grown smaller as I've gotten better at knitting, and now I find myself excited to WEAR my pieces and not just to knit them. It's kind of nice!
- I've tried almost everything in knitting except for steeks, just to see how it's done, but I still prefer the "standard" way of making a sweater by knitting each piece separately with seams. To me the key is to try everything you can access so you can have enough experience to make choices and develop preferences. It didn't take a whole sweater for me to decide there was no reason to switch to Combined knitting, for example, but I understand it and can teach it if I have to.
- My grandma taught me to knit when I was 7, in an attempt to keep me quiet. The quiet thing didn't work so well.
- My favorite yarn ever is Koigu. (ok that one you might already have guessed!)
- Even though I pretty much only knit for myself, I never seem to have exactly the right sweater to wear. If I were more diciplined and would just finish the eleventy-billion I have on the needles now, maybe I wouldn't feel that way.
- For as long as I can remember my parents have thought that "the knitting thing" was weird. In the course of the last 2-3 years, though, they've both started to really like my knitting and compliment me on the finished projects. It feels good to be (mostly) understood!
2 Responses
Gina
I think it is very important for every store to have a Knitting Drill Sergeant, and I can only giggle to think of you lightly slapping hands! Happy Blogiversary!
Nancy J
September 30, 2006
My grandmother crocheted by looking at pictures. She was a Swedish immigrant, and although she could speak English fairly well and could read it some, she really couldn’t read a pattern. This is partially because the stitches are different in Swedish. For example, I was told, a single crochet here was a double crochet to her, so patterns didn’t make sense as she translated them. But she was a master crocheter.