I’m a little late in getting this up and running. I actually missed Day 1, which will be rectified.
Day Two: 29th March. Skill + 1UP
Look back over your last year of projects and compare where you are in terms of skill and knowledge of your craft to this time last year. Have you learned any new skills or forms of knitting/crochet (can you crochet cable stitches now where you didn’t even know such things existed last year? Have you recently put a foot in the tiled world of entrelac? Had you even picked up a pair of needles or crochet hook this time last year?
Last year I re-taught myself to knit. Usually, when one thinks of re-learning one’s knitting style, you’d assume that you were learning, say, continental (picking) method vs. “english” (throwing). I swapped one throwing method for another.
I had seen a video online that featured Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s knitting style — at least for small projects. She just whipped through the rounds on a sock, and I thought to myself… “I’d love to knit that quickly!” I was knitting with the needles under my fingers, which I’ve seen is fairly common these days. It seemed like a very slow method, but slow & steady eventually won the race, right?
I found a Ravelry group for folks who had taken the Yarn Harlot’s mini-seminar on how to knit cottage-style, and that allowed me to find even more videos. There are two different knitting “stances” — one for knitting in the round, one for knitting on straights.
The hardest part to learn was how to hold the yarn. The advice that was given was to just try knitting with the new method for at least 5 minutes per day, gradually increasing your time. I found that once I figured out how to tension the yarn, it didn’t take long until I was knitting at almost the same speed I would have normally knit.
It’s been at least six months, maybe almost a year now, and I actually knit rather quickly. The video that I’ve linked to this blog entry was taken a couple of months ago by one of my co-workers at lunchtime. A friend had wanted an example of how I knit, and my (new, at the time!) cell phone was a great little video camera. I actually knit a lot faster than this…but for the sake of demonstration, I had slowed down considerably.
I don’t regret re-learning how to knit. It was a short-term pain in the arse for a good increase in speed. I also find that I can knit a lot longer without pain. Ergonomics, in my book, are always a plus!
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