Projects and procrastination

Hello everyone!

I have been a bad, bad blogger and not posted here in almost two months - for shame! I do have lots of lovely news for you though so please forgive me...


I have re-discovered my love/hate relationship with knitting. Now, knitting was something I was forced to do in 3rd class in primary school when I made the obligatory teddy (he was beige and fell apart on the way home) and I never, ever thought I'd come back to it. I'd hated every minute. Mum had tried to teach me how to hold the yarn and the needles and the difference between knit and purl etc but wow how I hated to knit.

Fast forward 18 years (holy crap! I'm getting old!) and when Mum was cleaning out her house before she moved abroad she 'donated' a lot of her things to me. So I ended up with a bag of about 18 balls of yarn and 30 or so knitting needles. Hmm. I ignore it. It rests in a corner of the sitting room and silently judges me, like only Mother's Wool can. There is a really nice blue chunky wool that I can't help staring at, two whole balls of it. And I mean, this knitting thing can't be that hard right? I did it when I was a kid. Plus Mr.K needs a nice scarf as it's pretty freaking cold out (January 2010 and 'The Snow') so I'll just do this one thing...

Half a scarf, several hand cramps and two blisters later I throw it all back into the stupid bag and shove it rather more violently into a darker corner again. Stupid knitting and it's stupid complexity. Grrrr. September 2010 we move house, Mr. K goes to India for work and I'm alone here with pretty much nothing to do. Plus it's starting to get cold again and Mr. K sure could do with a nice scarf for when he gets back as he'll be used to the 40+ degree temperatures of India...you see where this is going. I take out the half-done scarf and I knit. I knit like a woman possessed! I FINISH THE SCARF!!! Raaahhhh!!! Wooooooo!!! October 2010 when the handsome loveliness that is Mr. K arrives home I have the lovely, warm, blue, slightly-too-short-'cos-I-ran-out-of-wool scarf waiting for him. Go me!

Now, I don't want to spend the rest of my life knitting slight too short scarves. Nor do I have half a freaking clue how to knit! So last Wednesday I ventured into the City and whilst in Vibes & Scribes I picked up a lovely knitting book that has projects that are far too complicated for me BUT has a retard-me proof section at the back teaching the basic stitches and how-to's for the patterns in the book. This is great! I can read! In fact, I LIKE reading! So I can read about knitting and learn! Joy to the world!

In my rather finite wisdom I decided to make a patchwork quilt. See I look at it like this... I can knit squares of practise knitting so I can learn how to do the various different stitches  and then at the end I can join all those squares up and I'll have a big wooly quilt. Two birds, one stone kind of thing! So I cast on stitches like a crazy woman and start at square one. Literally.

It's purple. It's 66 stitches wide. It takes me 2.5 days to make and it makes me hate knitting all over again. Well, not hate, but it sure bores the shit out of me! I figure that this is because I'm working in knit and it's just plain 'ol garter again and once I'm onto something more fun it'll be fine. 12 inches by 12 inches later and I do feel some sense of achievement. Very purple achievement but achievement nonetheless!

Square two. It's white. It's purl. It occurs to me that (as far as my very limited knowledge goes) knitting all in purl will give me a 12 inch by 12 inch garter stitch square. Again. *headdesk*

So today I worked on every little damn thing I could that wasn't the quilt, I darned some of Mr.K's socks that had holes in them. I took all the buttons off a black cardigan of mine and sewed on random different coloured ones instead. I sorted through clothes that I'll no longer wear and put them aside for cutting up and using in other projects. Now I've nothing else to do and the knitting is taunting me. I know I have to do it. I know that this is the point of no return, if I can get past this damn garter square I'll be onto ribbing, and then stockinette stitch, and moss stitch, and increasing and decreasing and...and I still have 12 inches by 12 damn inches of stupid bloody purl in white to do. I could almost cry.

I've decided this blanket is going to be a family heirloom. Damned if I'm going to do all this work otherwise!