Alright, here we go! By request, I have started a knitting blog. This will be a way for people to see what I'm working on, and for me to talk about knitting to an audience that's interested, or at least will feign interest. I'll begin by talking about the project I'm currently working on, because that's the one of most interest to me right now. :)

I'm working on making a halter top for Julia's 2nd birthday. I'm using a pattern from Knitty, which is a wonderful online quilting magazine. They come out with new patterns four times a year, and then have a few "surprises" that come out in between each publishing to keep the knitters satisfied. I'm using this pattern, which I found a few months ago and could not get out of my head. When I got Laurel's invitation to Julia's birthday party next weekend, I couldn't resist ... I went out and bought some coral cotton yarn.

Mistake I will never make again: When yarn comes in hanks, get it wound at the store! I forgot when I bought this lovely cotton, and when I got home I was so eager to start knitting that I thought I could roll it into a ball by myself. NOT! I spent two hours untangling the knot before I got fed up, my wonderful, beautiful, and gracious sister spent about an hour and a half, and then I spent another fifteen minutes and finally got all of it into a ball. Ridiculous! I took the other hank back to the yarn store and they got it into a ball in about 2 minutes.

Skill I learned with this pattern: Provisional cast on.

I'd read about provisional cast ons, but had never attempted one until I found this pattern and decided it was finally time to bite the proverbial needle and do it. What provisional cast on means is that you use waste yarn to do some actual tricky kind of casting on, and then you knit the rest of the thing. What you get looks something like this (the yellow yarn is waste yarn):



Then, what provisional casting on allows you to do is to take off the waste yarn, and pick up the live stitches! Unlike simply picking up stitches from an edge, this allows a literally seamless flow into the garmet. Here, I've taken off the waste yarn and put the live stiches on double pointed needles. They're ready to be knit as part of the body!



Hopefully, I'll update later today with the finished product - I'm just not quite there yet.