Okay, here's the first of what may be many bitching posts about knitting.
So, knitting is the cool thing to do these days. People are crazy for it. People are making tons of stuff via knitting. There's a billion fun knitblogs out there. I spent the entire spring doing an insane amount of beading and felt like taking a break on it, so I decided to try to get in on the craze...and now I'm starting to wonder if I'm just incapable of doing it.
I've done a lot of crafts. I was in 4-H for a lot of years, and I literally took every home ec class at my school except for cooking. (I refuse to cook around other people, you had to have 6 people to a kitchen, and the people who took cooking, according to my friend Anna, were...not the brightest.) I was in FHA-HERO and won five awards for clothing design. I have a degree in clothing design, even though I'm not doing so much with sewing these days and have been working with jewelry design/random object design instead. But I'm pretty up there.
Out of all the crafts I've tried, I've been able to do most of them, and the few I wasn't good at were ones I really didn't like that much. I like looking at other people's quilts, but quilting itself always felt like I was going very slowly and getting nowhere with it. As for fabric dyeing, it can be very pretty, but I mostly find it very frustrating. I don't really do those any more and I'm happy not to.
Knitting, though, seems to be something that I would like to do, but I just don't have the ability to do it. My mother told me she could never knit, so I'm wondering if it's inherited lack-of-ability.
I wrote up the crochet story for Whirlwind Brain yesterday as part of a series on learning crafts. Writing it made me excited to do crochet again, especially since now I have an actual pattern (of sorts) for doing the iPod CORRECTLY now. Then I went on to work on the knitting sequel to it. That's not up yet because I'm at least going to wait till the end of the class to post it, but I figured I'd start "in progress." I had been looking at Tank Time Tank-Along at some point and got the idea somewhere along the line to make a tank from Berroco that used a lightweight yarn. I found some beauteous multicolored yarn, bought a ton, and got started...slowly.
And at first, I was feeling fairly cheerful about writing it, now that I'd finally managed to figure out how to fix my knitting when things got buggy, and have gotten used to working with small ribbon yarn + big needles, and figured out how to incorporate beads into the work. Lord knows, my project isn't likely to actually come out looking like this picture- I've had enough issues with the "loose fit" so that the back of it will probably be so see-through I have to wear a shirt underneath it and wear the tank as some kind of odd vest, and my stockinette stitch doesn't really look like a stockinette stitch- but that's okay, that could be kinda cool, what the hell. I had finished enough of the back before class (which is on Wednesdays, i.e. today) to show off. I don't know how to do the actual neck/arms/tank shaping quite yet, but I wanted to ask the teacher how to do it. I then decided to move on to doing the front and to save the back, and decided to start adding in beads a la this book. How hard could it be? Not very, as it turns out, and so far I've come out with this sample on the right that wasn't even too screwed up!
So I was happy. Until I went home yesterday to take some pictures of what I'd done so far to post along with the article. Okay, so the front beaded bit fell off the needle during the day and was going to be a pain to repair, but oh well, I thought, I can fix that.
Until I looked on in more detail at the back part I'd done, that was large and gappy but that I was so proud of for finishing. And then I realized what a freaking mess it was. That I'd thought I'd gotten every fallen stitch, but some had fallen almost to the bottom without me noticing. That my corrections...weren't the best. That in short, it was clearly too messed up to bring into class and say, "Look, teacher, I finished! Now teach me how to do the top bits!" That I'd probably have to freaking start over, it was so messy.
I hate having to wait an entire week to ask questions as to how to fix this crap! I don't really have any knitting friends in person (online, sure, but it's kinda hard to get a demo that way) to ask. We're on the fourth of six classes today, and I didn't want to waste the time. I've done knitting during almost all of my free time lately so I wouldn't. I can e-mail the teacher, but that can only do so much, and I can't really stop by her office for a long yak about yarn during my work time. We both work on a campus, but I feel guilty if I'm gone for longer than 15 minutes. And I'm not doing too well figuring out from books.
In short, I'm feeling rather dumb and frustrated and wondering if signing up for advanced sweater knitting in the fall is just going to be a total wash, and if I should just auction off my collection of needles and use my yarn for crochet instead. Perhaps I shouldn't have spent $30 on needles so I wouldn't always have to go out and buy more, not to mention all the knitting books I got in the last few weeks. I was so sure I'd like and be good at knitting, but...
It's hard for me to be dumb at certain subjects. I have usually been good in this realm (as opposed to say, math), so when I'm the slowest and dumbest one in class (a la math), it really bothers me.
