Knit 1, Purl 1, Purl 1...damn!

At the start of the year I, like many, made some New Year's Resolutions fully intending to do them at the time but knowing that by around this sort of time of year I wouldn't have accomplished any of them...but hey, I had good intentions! One resolution was to learn to knit, a reasonable goal I thought and after doing pretty well at cross-stitch over the Christmas period, well worth a go to add to my craft repertoire. I had an advantage as well in the form of my Gran who has been an avid knitter for most of her life and has recently taken it up again.

She agreed to give me some lessons but I think she was expecting me to forget about it within a week. So, imagine the surprise on her face when I turned up on her doorstep, ball of 'horrible acrylic wool' (her words, not mine) in hand and asked her to teach me. And I found it surprisingly easy-after a slightly tricky start with casting on ('No, NO! Not like that, around the back of the stitch!' 'I don't know what that MEANS!')-and managed a few rows of plain knitting within an hour of starting.

I quickly tired of the rubbish wool (it had come free with a magazine and kept splitting and creating extra unnecessary stitches so that the knitting got wider and wider) and so found an excuse to visit the wonderful treasure trove that it Masons wool store in Abingdon:

 

Ahhhhh! (imagine angel choir noise. Got it? Good)

If you haven't been to Masons before you could be forgiven for thinking that it doesn't look like much from the outside (you are forgiven, but get yourself down there, what are you waiting for? GO!). Masons is (according to their website) one of the oldest family-run businesses in Abingdon and (in my humble opinion) one of the best haberdashers around. They have three shops in Abingdon but this one here is the wool and upholstery fabric one on Stert Street.

Inside, once you pass the upholstery fabrics, you are treated to the view of hundreds of different balls of wool. And there actually are hundreds, in different colours, weights, materials-as far as I can tell pretty much any kind of wool you could want is housed in this Aladdin's cave of fleecy goodness. So as you can imagine, as a first time knitter finding the perfect wool for my inaugural project was a daunting task.

I had decided that leg warmers were a good simple thing to knit (my knitting tutor agreed) and so set about finding a pattern for them. And in doing so, I came across this:

This is Crofter Fair Isle effect wool. This essentially means that as you knit, it goes into a stripey pattern without you having to do anything except knit away and watch as pretty things happen before your very eyes! (This isn't quite the shade a chose but you'll see it further down...). For interested parties, the pattern I used is number 9206 and can be found here (or in Masons!).

So pattern and wool in hand, I got to work. It was okay going, pretty much, except when I stopped paying complete attention to what I was doing, for example when someone asked me how the knitting was going...Hence the name of this post, really; when I was working in the 1x1 rib bit (Knit 1, Purl 1) I kept forgetting which one I'd done, a problem which only got worse when I was doing a row of each stitch. So leg warmer number 1 is quite...individual, shall we say, if you look closely. The lovely Fair Isle pattern hides the fact that some rows are back to front by virtue of being stripey! Leg warmer number 2, on the other hand (or leg, I suppose), went really well because I'd worked out what I'd done wrong on number 1. Here is number 2:

Relatively awkward position but I managed not to fall off the stool!

So now my legs are warmer and I have the satisfaction when people ask where I got them of saying 'I Made Them!' (which, lets face it, is one of the reasons we make things ourselves, isn't it?)

I've also made the wrist warmers from this pattern, and am currently making a matching neck warmer...but that is a story for another day...