10 Reasons Why I Love Ravelry

1. Ravelry has let me connect and learn from other knitters when I had nobody that cared about knitting.

2. Ravelry lets me share my projects no matter how simple or complicated they are.

3. Ravelry has an awesome community for everything you can imagine!

4. Ravelry lets me find Local Yarn Stores (LYS) so I can shop for yarn in person instead of going online all of the time.

5. Ravelry understands that I have more ambition than I have time or money and lets me store any number of free patterns in my library.

6. Ravelry lets me have a place to catalog all of my yarn so I can know how much I have and lets me see how much I have used.

7. Ravelry provides a much needed ego boost when I need to show off something awesome that non-knitters just don't understand.

8. Ravelry gets it when I vent about not being able to finish a second sock because my sleep deprived brain was convinced that I knit enough to start the toe (hint: I was an inch off)

9. Ravelry is a horrible enabler with knitting and knitting accessories and I love them for it.

10.  Ravelry helps to let me know that I am not alone in my passion for knitting and that I am no less a person for letting my brain and fingers have a workout while making a beautiful and useable object.

Thank you Jess and Casey for bringing Ravelry into existence and for sharing it with the world.

Portable Knitting: Socks, Cars & Other Places

Every once in a while there is a question that keeps popping up. Where do you knit? And, more importantly, what do you knit if you knit somewhere outside your home?

Unlike most people, I learned to knit on the go. My friend Rebecca and I taught ourselves how to knit in the car while our Girl Scout Troop went to Savannah, Georgia. Yes, it was bumpy and we lost a whole bunch of stitches during the process, but it was fun and it kept us quiet during the long trip.

Naturally, one of the places I spend the most time knitting is in my car on my lunch break at work. It is a time where I get to relax and get out some of my frustration of working part time in a fast food restaurant. Most days, I don't really get a real break, so this stolen knitting time is a wonderful treat. It helps me decompress even if I am knitting in a smaller space and have to put my seat back from the steering wheel to get some room to put my needles.

I also only knit socks when I am out and about. I have tried knitting on several other projects when I am traveling, but I keep coming back to socks. They are small enough that they don't get in the way of other things that I might be doing. The needles are short enough that I'm not disturbing anybody or getting my needles caught on other things. Finally, the socks never get long enough to be really heavy on the needles or unweildy. This was the major reason why I stopped knitting scarves on the go. They would just get too long and heavy to carry around comfortably.

The only other places I knit a whole lot that isn't my own home would be my fiance's house, waiting at doctor's offices, and in our local library while waiting for my family to make their book choices. My book choices are mostly taken care of because that is my other job, so I tend to spend a lot of time there.

So, dear readers, what about you? Do you like knitting anywhere or are you a mostly knit at home kind of person?

Out of the Knitting Funk!

Taken with Instagram

I have finally picked up my knitting needles again after avoiding them like the plague for the last month. Part of that was because of the release of Pokemon Black 2 which I am having lots of fun playing during the evenings. Part of that is because I have been on the internet more than I realized. Socks do not get knit when you are browsing on the internet.

I am on the second sock of the No Purl Monkeys I am knitting for my college roommate Laura. The leg took me a total of two days to do. The short-row heel also took me two days to do. I kept putting it down in the middle searching for a better way to pick up the wraps from the wrap-and-turns. Sadly, I didn't figure out a good way and just winged it to make it look nicer. This is only my second time doing a short-row heel and I think I am going to spend some time and learn some different techniques to doing this heel. My wrap-and-turns just look bad once I try to pick them back up and I always struggle with holes. There will probably be a post about my exploration into sock heels once I finish the two socks on my needles.

On the bright side, I finally sucked it up and fixed my heels on my Mostly Handspun Socks! My first time with an afterthought heel didn't go as well as I thought it would and I made the heel a little too long.

The fix was a little complicated. I ended up having to cut off the end of my heels because I couldn't find the tail that I had skillfully woven into my sock. Then I had to rip out a little bit more of the heel before I just finished the heel like you would the top of a hat. Yes, there is a little bump on the end of my heel, but it doesn't bother me that much.

The socks are wearing extremely well too! It feels good knowing I took fiber and turned it into yarn and then knit a pair of socks from that yarn. It is an awesome feeling.

Tatting Saved My Knitting

I know how to do a few different crafts. The main craft that I like to do is knitting, but another craft that I like to do is shuttle tatting. I haven't done any tatting recently because I didn't like how my shuttle was working. It has a bobbin inside the shuttle that you can pop in and out to fill it up with thread easily, but the bobbin kept slipping the more I used it.

I was working on taking out my holding thread on my handspun socks so I can put in my afterthought heel and I was getting frustrated because my knitting needle was not small enough to un-knit the strand easily. I tried the small crochet hook that I have for fixing knitting mistakes and that wasn't small enough either. So I thought about my tatting and remembered that the shuttle had a tiny crochet hook that you can use to un-tat your mistakes. It worked beautifully to help me un-knit the holding thread.

I recently house-sit for my parents when they went camping. They have been going to a nice little campground with a town nearby that has an awesome yarn shop called the Gentle Arts. Last time they got me a comfy blue t-shirt with the name of the shop on it.

I was teasing them when they were leaving to remember that my favorite color was red. My mom also knits so I was hoping that they would bring me back a skein of sock yarn because I knew they would be going back to the store. Instead, they remembered that I wanted a niddy noddy that was more travel sized and brought one home to me. It is beautiful! It is made out of medium walnut and the top and bottom bars rotate so that it can lay flat in the bag. This makes it perfectly travel sized! It wraps up skeins that is 1 1/2 yards in size which is smaller than the bigger niddy noddy that my dad made me which wraps up to 1 3/4 yards. If I had it my way, I would have my Dad make me another one that had the features of this tiny one, but was big enough to hold 2 yards. That way I wouldn't get them mixed up. I can't wait until I get to use it.

Second Sock Blues

“As usual, the sock yarns have no idea what is going on.” ― Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, All Wound Up: The Yarn Harlot Writes for a Spin

I love knitting socks. I love the fact that I can get a perfect pair of socks that fit my feet like a fine leather glove. I love the fact that I can take one sock with me wherever I am going and be perfectly content no matter what happens. I even love that one sock can look so different from the other sock because of slight differences in the way the yarn was dyed.

I simply cannot stand actually knitting the second sock sometimes. When it is a complicated pattern, I can usually push through the second sock with no problem at all. The pattern either becomes soothing or interesting to knit again. The trouble comes when I want nothing more than a pair of vanilla socks with a rolled hem at the top. The second sock just becomes so boring, but I want the end product so badly that I keep knitting anyway.

The yarn is the big savior in this second sock. It is spiraling instead of stacking on top of itself. Even better, the cuff spirals one way while the leg of the sock is spiraling a different way. This makes the whole thing more visually interesting even though the knitting is so simple. I think I am reacting this way because my life has become easy enough that I want something challenging to distract me. But I started something simple and I have to finish. If I let myself become distracted now, I will never want to finish this pair of socks.

This might be a good time to get caught up on my television shows.