Craft Blog

Ed’s Note: Please welcome Charm to CraftBlog, our Victorian crafter extraordinare, this post will hopefully be the first of many here!

When I was a kid my grandma would always have a box of yarn and a bag of needles sitting beside the sofa so it was only natural that I (being a very inquisitive child) would want to learn to knit! She spent hours showing me how to cast on, knit/purl, drop stitches (well maybe I learnt that one myself), increase/decrease and cast off. Most of this was done while creating myself a scarf, the starting point of most knitters experience! I progressed to sweaters and slippers over the years but then other activities took over.

Now that I’m in my 30s and I have space in my house to explore crafting again I’ve realised that I not only forgot how to knit but I now live 1000 kms from my grandma! So I turned to the internet and found a few helpful sites to get me started.

Getting started

There are so many websites out there and some very helpful people making videos to show you what to do. The one I turn to most is KnittingHelp as their video tutorials are easy to understand and the layout of the site shows you examples of each stitch or aspect of knitting. It was through this site that I found the longtail caston which I now use for all my projects. It seems harder to begin with but it is a wonderfully stretchy caston and doesn’t loosen off when you work the first row like some caston methods do.

Simple patterns

Once you’ve cast on and are knitting row after row of gorgeous stitches you might want to look at a simple pattern that will provide you with something more than a scarf (not that there is ANYTHING wrong with scarves! I love them!). A great site to start with is Knitty. They’ve been around for about 6 years now and have a fantastic archive of patterns, some very handy hints, a forum to get nerdy with other knitters and best of all a knitting shorthand dictionary. A few things that are on my list to try (I’m still looking at Mellow and Tangy patterns) are these very functional legwarmers and calorimetry head cover. Obviously living in Melbourne has a pretty big impact on what I want to knit!

Communities

As with most activities on the internet they culminate in communities, the Knitty forum is one of them, there is also Ravelry, KnitPicks and this one seems busy Knitting@LiveJournal. But you don’t have to keep it online. The most awesome thing about knitting is that its a portable craft, we can take it with us wherever we go, on the tram, in the car, at a cafe waiting for our chocolate cake and coffee to arrive… We can participate in KnitAlongs, get together with strangers and Knit in Public, start ourselves a Stich’n'Bitch with some of our friends at the local pub or if you want to be all gansta like, get a knitting graffiti team together. I think the most important thing about knitting though isn’t what you make, or how you made it, but how it makes you feel when the finished product is being used.

So get out there, KNIT! and then come back and show us what you’ve made.

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