2021
talk and talk and talk
maura @ 6:04 pm
I am trying to learn how to knit, and it has been kind of hilarious. My mom knits and about a million years ago she got me a learn to knit puppet kit which I’d never quite been able to bring myself to do. I’m not sure why I had such a weird block for so long. I generally enjoy making things (I can sew and go through phases of sewing stuff: purses and phone cases in the past, masks more recently [obvs]), and it feels like knitting is a useful skill to have (though sometimes I mentally push back on that because why do I feel the need for a productive hobby?). And I know lots of folx knit during meetings and wow, and the end of this year with endless work zooms I have really been wanting something to help me stay focused in meetings. Which I think is ultimately why I dug the puppet kit out of a drawer last month and gave it a whirl.
It’s been a wild ride so far. The instructions were kind of confusing but I was able to get the first few rows knitted alright, thinking back now I’m not sure why I didn’t go to youtube right away but I’m stubborn like that. The yarn in the kit had come twisted in a skein and at first I just pulled yarn directly from it, only to realize after things got horribly tangled that duh, the first step is to wrap the yarn into a ball (and then I remembered that my kid used to help my mom do that with her knitting when he was a toddler). So I pulled the needles out of what I’d done so far and unraveled it, untangled and wound the yarn into a ball, and started again.
I am also impatient, so after the first few newly-knitted rows went smoothly I got ahead of myself and decided that I was good enough to knit while watching TV. That went okay-ish — we were watching “Search Party” and during the tense parts I dropped a few stitches, but I thought I’d been able to pick them up okay. Then we started watching “Ted Lasso” (omg so so good) and I made a bigger mistake, but instead of stopping to fix it I just kind of plowed on through. And the combination of all of those mistakes meant that I ended up with something that is not at all a rectangle of 44 stitches by 80 rows, as you can see, because I kept adding stitches (though I didn’t really internalize that until I got to the next step).
Next up was to knit each half of my non-rectangle more narrowly to create a head for the puppet, which I also messed up. On the one side I did the knit two together stitches too aggressively (every stitch rather than two stitches each row), so it got all puckered. On the other side I tried to make up for it by not knitting narrowly enough. The finishing up bit was folding the knitting in half and sewing in (with a tapestry needle, who even knew I had one of those in my sewing box?) a precut piece of fleece for the mouth and striped buttons for eyes.
And woooooooooow, wow, that puppet is a hot mess. (Though to be fair, even if I’d knitted everything perfectly the puppet would still be kind of scary, at least if the photo on the instructions is to be believed.) I’m not sure why I didn’t rip stitches out to go back and fix it once things truly went pear-shaped. I think I keep telling myself that it’s good to have this record of knitting errors for the future? My mom came to visit a couple of weeks ago and also told me that I’m doing the knit stitch slightly wrong, the way I’m doing it is called knitting into the back of the stitch. Which I’d suspected, having finally taken a look at a youtube video.
When I started the puppet I thought I might give it away, but now that it’s so very ugly I think I have to keep it forever? I texted a friend and they called it ugdorable (lol). I do have some more yarn, so maybe I’ll try for a very basic scarf next.
