Every time I go into The Quilted Skein in La Grange, Texas, I see beautiful samples like this shawl. I get inspired to knit but somehow when I return home, I find I already have a long to-do list and knitting never makes it to the top. Sometimes even the top items on my to-do list don’t get any attention.
I visited the Texas Quilt Museum recently in La Grange, Texas. A while back I missed their exhibit of butterfly quilts and now I make an effort to go to each exhibit. (They change their exhibits once a quarter.) On one side of the museum is a beautiful garden, Grandmother’s Flower Garden (photos to come in a separate post) and on the other side is The Quilted Skein, a wonderful quilt fabric and yarn shop.
I met Barbara Taylor of Bastrop in The Quilted Skein, as she brought in her in-progress socks for show-and-tell. Look at those fabulous stripes! She said the yarn was dyed that way, and the stripes appeared as she knitted. Those are going to be some lucky feet that get those socks! She was nice enough to let me photograph her work. I told her I was going to post it to my blog and that she would be “almost famous.”
Knitted sock by Barbara Taylor of Bastrop
A peek into the top
My knitting skills are limited to scarves: I cast on 13 stitches, knit until I think the scarf is long enough and bind off. Usually I bind off a different number of stitches that I started with, sometimes 11, 12, or 14. I mentioned this to the women at The Quilted Skein and they said they have some beginner knitting classes coming up. Hmmm, maybe I can learn to count and knit?
And now, a confession. La Grange: I’ve always heard (and pronounced) “Grange” with a long a (ā). One day I was roaming around my French dictionary and found “la grange,” as in “the barn.” Even though I studied French (a long time ago), it still never occurred to me that La Grange was anything other than “lagrānge,” the name of a Texas city. It’s good to learn something new every day, but a little surprising to learn something now that I should have learned a long time ago.
Monday Up Close
Here is my first knitted washcloth. I’m trying to learn the “Continental” knitting method, as opposed to the one I currently use, the “English” method.
Knit, purl, knit, purl, knit, knit, knit, purl, purl, purl
There’s nothing wrong with the English method, except maybe the way I use it. I hold the target knitting needle and to-be-knitted yarn in my right hand and the source knitting needle in my left hand. All that is normal. After I insert the target needle through the source loop, I let go of the target needle, take the to-be-knitted yarn and loop it counter clock-wise around the inserted needle, catch the newly-looped yarn on the target needle and pull it off the source needle onto the target needle. Well, that’s mostly it. It’s not so easy to explain; that’s why YouTube was invented, of course.
What I really do is somewhat reminiscent of a sidearm baseball pitcher on the mound. I lean over, eyeing the needles in my hands, mentally preparing for the next stitch. I concentrate on the movements required to increase the stitch count on the target needle. I steady my breathing. I begin the wind up and reach for the yarn. With the yarn in my hand, I pull it as far back as I can go and swing my arm out to the right in a wide arc. When my arm is fully extended at my side, I alter its direction to move it forward, finally bringing it in to the awaiting needle, loop it over and complete the stitch.
As you can imagine, this takes quite a bit of effort for professional baseball pitchers and knitters like me. Under normal circumstances, a professional baseball pitcher will stay in the game for a count of approximately 100 pitches. Unlike baseball teams who have a slew of pitchers on the roster with a couple of them warming up in the bull pen, if I want something knitted I’m on my own. Only getting about 100 stitches in any given session isn’t much progress. Knitting anything larger than a washcloth looks to be Herculean task. (I wonder, did Hercules knit as a way to keep his hands nimble for all his assignments?)
And this is why I want to learn the Continental method. It’s reported to be more efficient: hold the yarn in the left hand and loop it around the awaiting needle without letting go of either needle. No sidearm-ing required. I can do it, but ever so slowly, even slower than my tortoise speed with the English method. And sometimes it takes several tries to add even one stitch correctly. I’m still going to keep up my training to change and count on it being worthwhile in the long run. At my current speed, I figure I can have four or five washcloths completed by Thanksgiving. And you know what that means.
It’s beginning to look at lot like Christmas . . .
On the Austin Shop Hop last weekend, I happened upon these wall trophies at The Stitch Lab, in south Austin. These alone are reason enough to learn to knit.
Bear and Zebra wall trophies at the Stitch Lab
Cute knitted bear
A Zebra for all seasons
It's a long story ... 