Knotting

This picture was my second attempt at making Natalie Larson's Star Crossed Slouchy Beret on Ravelry.

The first time I counted the stitches completely wrong and ended up with a Crossed Star Slouchy Beret. But this second one was yummy, and correctly made!

Which is why I name this post 'Knotting'. I'm borrowing it from Elizabeth Honey's book Fiddle-back in the hope that she is as sweet as her name and won't really mind. The kids in the book try to knit something but end up messing it up so badly that they call it 'knotting' instead. My knitting is largely knotting, and I will explain this through two anecdotes, one relating to the hat above.

First, when my mother was teaching me how to knit back in 2007. She taught me how to hold the needles correctly, and how to hold the thread properly for the right tension. By the time I came to the end of that ugly terracotta coloured rib scarf I thought I'd conquered the world! Alas, I moved away for a year to a different country, away from my mother's patient knitting coaching and thus developed bad habits. Once not long after I got home, we were sitting in the living room with our respective knitting. Mum stopped after some time and looked at me. She then said; 'It gives me pain to watch you knit.' My technique, it seems, was not unorthodox as I had hoped; it was just plain wrong. And continues to be so! Bad habits are tricky to shake.

My second example of knotting, as I mentioned, relates to that glorious squishy blue hat. I am proud of it, despite the labour pains it brought. See, I know there is a Magic Loop method out there when using circular knitting needles. When I youtube it, it looks fantastically easy and straightforward. I would love to be able to knit socks with ML method! (As it is, I can barely knit competently with two needles; four would be far beyond my skill level.) But the Magic Loop method, when competing with my unorthodox/wrong knitting technique has failed me at every turn. If you can help, please tell me how!

I must here confess that when the stitches became fewer and fewer towards the crown of my Star Crossed Beret, there was much swearing and sweating over stretched and strained plastic circular needles. My solution (when I couldn't figure out the ML method) involved raiding my Dad's shed for wire which I fashioned into circular needles. The beauty of those makeshift wire circulars was that when the stitches grew fewer and fewer, I could simply snip off the end of the needles with wire cutters and continue on my merry knotted way.

Terrible, no? But it worked. See that crown? It's a squashy little star. And the recipient of that hat (admittedly a non-knitter) was none the wiser. Viva la Knotting!