Freecycle!

So here it is, humid as usual, and I'm lusting over yarns and patterns when the thought pops in my head to check out my local Freecycle! I actually found a post from yesterday where a lady on the other side of my county is offering a free bag of misc. yarns. No idea what, or exactly how much, but hello free yarn! *fingers crossed*

So if you think you'd just find kids stuff, old exercise bikes and the likes there, think again! You never know what you'll find...or hey, you could even get rid of that ugly yarn you'll never use that you got as a well meaning gift and give it to a home where a new knitter or someone who's as dirt poor as me would really appreciate it!

Summer blues

It's not been a conductive time to work on my knitting lately. The heat and humidity have been playing hell on my Fibromyalgia. While the higher dose on my baclofen has been helping more with my pain, my concentration is shot, plus the humidity makes even thinking about using yarn a joke. Right now it's 7:45AM, already 70F with 88% humidity, and a high of 90F forecast...ugh!

Of course this isn't just affecting my pursuits of washcloth making. I also missed the last weekend of the RenFaire in Ohio. Woke up with a killer headache, plus severe nausea that didn't even go away with a surprise iced coffee from Mr. Concerned. Not even him offering to complete my outfit was enough to get me to go unfortunately. (Hopefully by next year I can sew us clothes!) And my sleep is also suffering. I always feel like I'm sticking to the sheets...if only I could afford to condition my air.

For now, until it cools off, I'm staring forlornly at my small skein of blue cotton yarn, and the one multicolored skein of surprisingly soft acrylic I got last week that I think will make a lovely simple scarf, although I should probably get a few more of the same lot. But the weather calls for it not getting under 80 until this weekend, with a lot of rain showers. Which will be good for Tim's tomatoes, but not soon enough for me!


Addendum: I didn't even realize it's been since the 8th that I started this blog. It only felt like a few days ago all this weather crud started...ahh the joys of brain fog.

The perils of beginning to knit

Long story short, I wanted to learn to knit thanks to the internet. Ah, it's such a wonderful tool sometimes.

For my birthday, my boyfriends mother bought me the Denise interchangeable needle set since regular length needles were hell on my hands, and I really wanted the pink cords. I was coveting those for all sorts of projects I want to do, so I'm very glad I got them, they work so beautifully. A few skeins of cheap yarn later, and I'm now working on my first 'real' project: a cotton washcloth with a puppy dog paw print found here. And that's where the perils being!

I think I've unraveled the sucker 3 times so far, and only gotten as far as the 8th row, because somehow I kept adding stitches accidentally. After much internal cursing, and throwing the boy cat off of my lap a few times, I have figured out the main reasons I'm adding stitches.

1) At the beginning of a row, I wasn't orienting my work properly. By forcing the yarn to the back of the needle, it looked like I was up one stitch. Now I know to tug it down to properly orient it. That one only took a TON of frustration to figure out!

2) This project is my first foray into purling. Very simple once I got the hang of it, but the first stitch between knit and purl was adding a stitch, and I didn't realize it until I'd count my stitches and find I was up to 40 from 36, ugh!

The problem ended up being that I actually had to move the yarn to the front of the work from the back. None of the video's I'd seen about purling had addressed this, so I may write into my favorite YouTube knitting / crafting channel (CyberSeams) and see if they'd do a quick vid about common mistakes us newbies make :) I would if I were more photogenic lmao

So hopefully over the next few days I'll finish that darn washcloth and move on to something a little larger.