Catching Up!

I'm finally getting caught up! This weekend, I learned how to knit...kind of. At the beginning of the semester, I picked up an instructional booklet on how to knit. It did not go well. There were vague written descriptions and the pictures did not help illustrate what exactly I was supposed to be doing. I struggled with that for the first week and a half of class before abandoning it for YouTube, which was a wise decision. After class last Thursday, I sat down with the most viewed "knitting for beginners" video and, by golly, I learned! Oh, let me rephrase: Ten hours later, by golly, I learned! Seriously, ten hours later I had only three rows done and it was a disaster. When I tried to start the fourth row, there were about four loops hanging out the edge instead of one and more holes than stitches. I unraveled and started again. Now it's looking a lot better (less holes, actually somewhat resembles a knitted object) and I think I'm just going to forge ahead and crank out a swatch. I hope I have enough determination to ignore the mistakes and just finish something! I think I need to focus on slowing down, making sure I'm taking the correct steps each time, tightening the yarn uniformly, and not getting carried away with the repetition. Often I will get lost in repeating the movements and not realize I've messed up until it's too late. Patience, patience, patience! I guess I have to adopt that virtue sometime, right? It's proving difficult. However, I am extremely excited that I was able to half way teach myself something I thought it would take me months to learn, even from an expert! I thought it would be much more difficult. Now, I see that the difficulty lies in becoming a skilled knitter, which I am very willing to work toward. I'm having so much fun learning a new skill and having something to do while watching movies, something I do way too much of. I actually feel productive and lazy at the same time, its incredible! I don't have a camera, but I will borrow an iPhone from a friend to take a picture of my swatch as soon as I get it done. That's my goal this week!