Leslie: Part 2

On Friday I attended my second private knitting lesson, and boy oh boy, did Leslie ever school me over again! That girl knows her #$%*! We spent the first hour doing what I desperately needed help with, which is fixing mistakes over and over again. We grabbed a ball of super chunky yarn and some size 15 needles so that it would be easy to see what I was doing, and she purposefully made what seemed like hundreds of mistakes and taught me how to fix them, and then made those same mistakes and gave it to me to fix. Of course, in the process of knitting with her I also made my own natural mistakes, which she was there to say, "Ooooh, what did you just do? How do we fix that? Nope, not like that...yes, there you go!" The result is that later that evening as I was knitting at home and realized I'd made a mistake three rounds back in my newest project, I had no problems tinking (tinking is the process of unknitting--note that *tink* is *knit* spelled backwards, tricky tricky) 135 stitches to get back to the problem AND fix it. Yeah baby. That's what I'm talking about.

So last night I finished my latest project, the Winter Brights hat:

This was a fun and easy project that Leslie told me would only take a couple of evenings to make, and though I doubted her, she was correct. Leslie decided after our mistake-fixing session on Friday that I was ready to begin working with circular needles and "knit in the round" as they call it, so we began work on this hat, and I must say I'm pleased with the result. Working in the round is different, but in my opinion, far preferable than knitting with two unconnected needles. Instead, the needles you work with are connected with a cable, so the project works itself around in a circle as you go. The Winter Brights Hat begins with a ribbed edge for three inches and then transitions into a seed stitch, which I had never done before but was pretty neat. So there it is folks: project number three is in the books! Knitting has been a fulfilling and fun new activity for me; not only do I honestly love the process of it, but then you get an end result that's cute and occasionally brag-worthy. =)

Have a great day readers! And congratulations to the Green Bay Packers!