Tonight while walking home, I talked to my dancing partner about knitting. Remark, to a guy! He can knit and got what I was saying or at least made “ohs” and “ahs” and said “how impressive” in the right places. People who don’t knit don’t get this. If you are one of these people, I don’t take it personally when you don’t read on. But I feel the need to express my love for knitting and my excitement for techniques tonight.
I learned to knit when I was a child. My grandma and my mum taught me to knit different patterns with knit and purl stitches, cables, how to construct a sweater, raglan sleeves and socks. I was content. After a long break during my university years I picked knitting up again some years ago. I knitted quite a bit before I stumbled over Ginny’s blog and her Yarn along. I started blogging about knitting as well and started reading other knitting blogs. I discovered ravelry. And this changed my knitting life!
Over the last one and a half years I learned so many new and exciting things that didn’t exist in my mum’s or grandma’s knitter life nor, to be honest in German knitting books from the 70s and 80s. First I learned how to do short rows even though I didn’t know that they were short rows at the beginning. But they are my favourite methods to turn the heel on socks now. And I slowly learn how to use them to shape other things too.
Then I learned that you could construct a sweater from top down (like the Gemini in the picture). Raglan sleeves I knew but top down constructions have the advantage of being usually seamless as a whole and not only around the shoulder which I love a lot. I hate sewing my knits together. Honestly. My stitches usually don’t look as nice as want them to be. So seamless constructions, which do work well from bottom up as well, were a revelation.
I also learned about lace knitting (like my first attempt on lace knitting, my lonely tree shawl). This was something I had never even thought about before I discovered all those knitting blogs and ravelry. While lace knitting is still not too high on my list, every now and then (like yesterday) I get excited and want to do something with it. I curious if I will get to the stage where I can see a medium difficult lace pattern and know how to replicate it without a pattern as I do with cables.
Another thing I tried was colour work. Now this is definitively not my favourite and my brother’s christmas sweater will be a single child for quite some time. I might try it again in the future but it will take time.
I even constructed some things myself and turned them into a pattern that you can find on ravelry. While my hat doesn’t get much attention, nor does my (not very exciting to be honest) crochet mobile case, my Katniss cowl got it all. I now know how extremely difficult it is to write a pattern. While I can definitively construct something, putting it into words and charts is extremely difficult. I surely admire people who do that. I might not buy many pattern and relay more on free patterns or try to recreate looks without a pattern because I’m a bit niggard. But I do appreciate all your work and the way it influences my knitting.
There are so many more things to discover out there and I’m excited to see and try them. Especially construction is a huge topic for me. The kitchener stitch just wowed me. And purlrika’s method to knit in sleeves that are meant to be knit seperately was one of them. Honestly, if you are into construction and seamless knitting, check out her post. I think it does require a quite advance knitting knowledge and some thinking and calculating but the result is great.
I just wanted to say thank you to Ginny for hosting the Yarn Along and taking me to the world of knitting bloggers. I want to say thank you to all those knitting bloggers for sharing their work with the world and sharing new and old techniques. And I want to say thank you to all those designers out there who share their patterns on ravelry as well as to all the knitters who share their interpretation of patterns there.
If you have read until here, you probably share my love for knitting. If you don’t but made it through, you might as well try it out. And even though this might sound geeky (ok, after this post, that doesn’t matter anymore) let’s reference a good book here: May the yarn be ever in your favour… (it went that way, somehow, didn’t it?)
schnoerrchen 