Saturday, March 24, 2007

green with envy

So how much did I want to be Representing in NYC with the Yarn Harlot, Guido, Kimberly, and all the other fantastic knitters on Thursday? It sounded so fun, and from what I've been reading, everybody had a great time. Grrr . . . darn kids and their needing to be picked up from school!! I did at least KIP, at the dentist's office. And I finished Little Brother's socks. I hate to say it, but they are pretty awful. Green and scratchy . . . the damn things are so stiff they stand up by themselves:
As predicted, however, Little Brother is quite pleased with them, so all is well.

Yeah, that last one doesn't really show the socks all that well, but he leaped on to the couch and said, "Mom, take a picture of my butt! I mean my socks!", waggling his little rear in the air. Well, what would you have done? And if you look closely, you can see more of the heinous green acrylic underneath him, running from his hand, because he's finger-knitting with it. We also discovered something else about that yarn when he wore the socks to school on Friday - it makes his feet smell really, really bad. Man, this stuff just gets better and better.

Another discovery I have made, although I'm sure I'm not the first: it's criminal how most people learn to knit. To explain, I, like many, was taught to knit on cheap needles, with cheap yarn. I mean, I loved it and all, because it's knitting, but today my four sets! of brand-new! addi turbos! that I totally scored on ebay! came in and I started Big Brother's socks, using black wool yarn, on them. It was like a religious experience, and I'm not even religious. I know it's a little daunting to drop more than the least amount of money possible on something you've never tried before, and it must be difficult for a knitter to pull something fabulous from the stash to teach somebody, but it's so much nicer. It seems like a lot of people start off buying crappy yarn from Michael's at first, then eventually discover the joy of the LYS. It seems so wasteful, right? Does the crap just get shoved to the bottom of the stash? Because then what happens is your six-year-old pulls it out and demands socks from it. Or maybe this is just a natural progression that is essential, in its way, to the learning-to-knit experience. I don't know.