Feelin' crafty

Wednesday was (for me) a very productive craft day. I went to Klose Knit to sign up the hat making class that is supposed to be on Tuesday the 13th. Brigitte, the store owner, had me buy the supplies and then she helped me start the hat right then as it was a little slow in the store and the teacher for the 13th is double booked with modular knitting and the hat class. I sat down on the couch to cast on my 66 stitches so she could show me how to join and work in the round on the circular needles...and it turns out that my cast on is weak at best. The stitches were all twisted so she had me pull it out and start over by a long-tail cast on (which she had to teach me really quickly). So once that crisis was over we discovered that the needles that I had were too small so I had to upgrade to size 11 needles so I had to rip everything out again! Before we decided it was the needles, Brigitte showed me how to make a stitch to try to get the hat to the right size but a couple of stitches definitely wasn't going to help. The upside of the needle upgrade was that now I own my very first pair of Addi Turbo circular needles and they are wonderful! I had really been fighting with the plastic connector in the Clover needles because it kept wanting to twist back into the shape they remembered from being in the package...even after running the connector under hot water. After the new needles and another round of casting on, I was ready to knit! I managed to successfully join the hat and I was ready to knit like crazy when Brigitte noticed that I was throwing my yarn over the top of the needle when I knit instead of bringing it up from the bottom. Man, I really thought that I had the basics of knitting down but I was wrong! But Brigitte corrected my mistakes and then sent me out into the world (it was already a little after store closing time) telling me to knit 5" worth of hat before the class so that I would be ahead of the game!

I was already working on a gray wrap so now I have two projects going! I managed to work on both of them and made a good amount of progress in one day. I could have done more but there were new episodes of Bones, Criminal Minds, and Lost that I wanted to watch and I am not skilled enough to watch TV and knit at the same time. I can listen and knit but I wanted to devote my full attention to the new episodes. Here are a couple of pictures of what I accomplished yesterday. The pink hat was started yesterday but I had ten rows already done on the gray wrap so the end rows on the wrap don't count.

The first picture shows the height of the hat a little bit better...
but the second photo just shows the pattern on the gray wrap a little bit better...
Until next time...