Girls' Club Knitting 2012

The Girls' Knitting Club was exhausting, but satisfying. Thanks be to God/Goddess/Great Spirt/Allah/Whoever is the Boss of Your Club, a woman I wasn't expecting to show up, did show up. Thank you, Pat! She's a leftie and we have three left-handed girls in the group. Trying to teach a leftie, if you're a rightie, how to knit is really hard.

There were about thirty girls total, divided among four teachers. We even had one mom show up. She learned alongside her daughter. I loved that! Pat took the lefties. Meaner (aka Karen), my granddaughter Savanah, and I divided up the rest.

The girls were so excited and they all wanted to be attended to at the same time. Impossible. So, I spend a great deal of the time calming them down and asking them to be patient, as I'm hovering over each girl individually, with my hands on their hands, teaching them to cast on and then do the knit stitch.

Some of them catch on very quickly and others take a lot of attention. It isn't that these others are slow, but, like my friend Terry (who I consider to be one of the most brilliant people I know), there is something about spatial tasks that elude them. Their brains don't interpret correctly what their eyes are seeing. With a lot of patience, they can learn too. I taught Terry to knit about five years ago. She cranks out washcloths and other simple things pretty regularly. Each time she has to learn a new stitch or method, we go through the agonizing process of getting her brain to understand.

In other knitting news from yours truly, I've been on a sock binge. I'm not a fast knitter and most sock yarn is eensy, knitted with tiny needles, and takes for-effing-ever to complete. The end result is worth it, but they do take a long time. Occasionally, I want to knit up a pair of socks quickly, so I use worsted weight yarn. The sock patterns for worsted weight yarn are pretty boring, so I made one up of my own. This was the end result ~

The use the two socks at a time on two circular needles method of building socks. The basic recipe for the pattern is as follows ~

Cast on 40 stitches for each sock and divide on to two circular needles.

K1, P1 rib for about an inch

Knit one round.

Pattern:

1. *k1 tbl, k2tg, yo, k, repeat from *

2-5. *k1 tbl, k3, repeat from *

6. *k1 tbl, k, yo, k2tg, repeat from *

7-10. *k1 tbl, k3, repeat from *

Repeat pattern for desired length of top part of sock.

I use a short-row heel using a clever method developed by Socktopus and then continue the pattern on the top part of the sock, knit the bottom in stockinette, and a simple decrease on each side of the sock, every other row, until I'm down to 8 or 10 stitches. Bind off using whatever method works best for you.