Novelty Nostalgia

One of my blog friends (someone I've never met in person, but I still feel as if I know her) is a crocheter and sometime knitter who has said that when she takes up knitting for real she will have to go back to the beginning of this blog so she can remember that I was once a struggling beginner knitter.

She thinks the stuff I do now is beyond where she could ever get to in her own knitting.

Well, here I am to remind people that not everything in knitterland is complex and beautiful (well, hardly anything of mine is ever complex, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder), and it is possible to move up from very humble beginnings.



I am self-taught from a book. Some of my first projects were fun fur scarves (which I love, by the way -- don't be dissing the fun fur -- I don't knit with it any more, but that doesn't mean I don't like it) that started out with 16 stitches on the needle and gradually grew to where they were 25 stitches wide. I didn't realize I had turned the knitting slightly on the needle so that the loop underneath looked like two stitches. I would happily knit into those "stitches" and not notice until the width of the scarf started increasing.

This is how I learned to count the stitches on the needle every couple of rows, just to make sure I still had the right number.



Then one day I decided to get fancy with my novelty yarns, and mix them up together in what I thought would be interesting scarves. (This is one of those moments when you say to yourself, "WHAT was I thinking??") At around this time I started to lose my love of novelty and learn to love wool yarn. Well, that and wanting to make a felted bag. However, it should be noted that I learned a new knitting skill from this: changing colours, or I guess more accurately, using more than one type of yarn in a project.

Using more than one type of yarn in a project culminated in what I thought would be a Stashbuster scarf (which ultimately ended its short life splashing in the frog pond). Really, what was I thinking?



Well, I thought I was very clever to use a 100 cm circular needle to knit a scarf lengthwise with long stripes of cheap acrylic and novelty yarns. (And I do mean cheap acrylic; it came in a tangled heap from the yarn factory outlet at 5 dollars for a garbage bag full.)



One of my last forays into knitting with novelty yarn was the outside enclosure of Princess Cali's Cat Bed. I made sure, however, to knit the base with good Lopi wool, because, surprisingly, my cat is a quite a conoisseur when it comes to fibre. If she can't get any raw fibre to lie on, she will settle for the nearest hand-knit object. She used to be satisfied with her cat bed. But now she heads straight for my shawl or the comfort blanket I was given after my hip surgery.

So I guess if anyone's a yarn snob in my family, it's the cat.