There has been some astonishing progress with the ol' sticksnstring lately, mostly because I stealthily cast on (and off) a pair of mittens for my 2 year old neighbor girl for Christmas (It's only five and a half months away, people!). She's absolutely adorable and I think every single preschooler NEEDS to have a pair of bright red mittens, preferably on a little fingerknit string to prevent mitten loss. They should be issued on their second birthday, just to ensure full penetration of the preschooler market. I picked up some Debbie Stoller Alpaca Love at Michaels on clearance a few weeks ago in bright red and bubblegum pink, which immediately gave me visions of a 2-row striped scarf and mittens for the Neighbor Cutie. Surprise, surprise...once I cast on, the mittens took about 2 hours each, and I'm slow. Armed with this knowledge, I suddenly feel a knitting binge coming on, with plenty of bright red alpaca/wool and two more toddlers among my coworkers to be recipients. This is going to be a doozy.
Also, among my FO list for the day is the first Rockin Sock, with the second being cast on as we speak. I love this pattern (Unisex Slip) and will probably return to it a fair amount from here on. That makes three, count 'em, three FO's in one day, which is a marvelous victory. When Birch is done, it will have absorbed so much knitting victory that I will have no choice but to drape it about my shoulders every time I knit for a deadline, just for the mojo.
All this thinking about progress has me looking back a little at my history with knitting. I learned the knit stitch, longtail cast on, and the classic bindoff from my mother as a child, but quickly developed a chronic low grade distaste for garter stitch, especially in rectangular forms. Since she felt she could not impart any further skills in this area, that was about all I had, so I dropped it. My college freshman roommate was a crocheter, but too mean to bother to teach me, so all that did for me was spur me to pick knitting back up out of spite, to have a competing interest. I struggled for years to understand book descriptions of the purl stitch until one day it clicked and my knitting world expanded.
This is the story of my knitting life...I learned almost everything myself through a process of beating my head against it until one day my hands just do it out of nowhere. I learned knitting in the round on DPN's when a friend in my medical school days made me a stethoscope cozy and pointed out where the pattern was online. Google those words and you'll find it too. I struggled and struggled and one day it just made sense for no reason. The seventeen inches of in the round stockinette per cozy was a perfect way to practice DPN use, and the widening at the top taught me another useful skill...M1 increases. My increases always looked like poo until I realized that a KFB was not the only one around. Learning to knit in the round was absolutely a watershed moment for me, in that it significantly widened the possibilities for me and made anything possible. That was when I met the crowning love of my entire knitting career - socks. Once I made a couple, I was hooked.
My hands suddenly learned to do two-handed stranded colorwork the very same way just a month or two ago...rather spooky actually. It was the same theme of struggling and struggling and one moment I looked down and the movements were smooth, different than other ways I had tried before for no reason I could fathom. Lately, I've been struggling and struggling against that absurd deadline on Birch and then suddenly the friction gave way and now I have three FO's. Knitting has friction, oh yes...now I just have to figure out the coefficient of friction and I'll be able to overcome it more easily. (Yes, I took physics in college. Yes, I'm making a physics-related point in a knitting blog. I'm just that cool.)
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