A blog about fibre, wine, and all things cozy.

Saturday, April 9, 2011

The shawl is almost finished!

Surprisingly the shawl is almost finished. I am a little shocked by this as each row is now taking a long time to complete. But, it will be finished by the end of the weekend and hopefully blocking by Sunday night. So now I am thinking about what to cast on next. I am waffling between three other projects. Do I go from here to Julia


 Or here to Pogona


 Or here to Herbivore


 The problem isn't that I don't know what to knit, I just don't know what to knit next.

This got me thinking about my friend Tanya. Tanya is by all accounts is still in the infancy of her knitting career, if you measure her knitting career in length of time she's been knitting. If, however, her measure her knitting stage by projects completed, she is a full fledged adult knitter. Like anything else that Tanya touches, she masters it fairly quickly and has completed projects that have left the rest of us stunned and in awe of her learning curve. (Her third project was a 6 colour Fair Isle cardi that turned out beautifully and fits better then anything she could have bought in the store.) She has until very recently been a one project at a time kind of girl. This ended a few months ago when I was at her place and she brought out a new project that she was working on and proudly stated, "see I have two projects on the go now." She was beaming. It was like the dirty little secret that she was a monogamous project knitter was finally shaken off and she could air out her deception. She finally felt like she was a real knitter and even told me so. I was floored. She didn't feel like a real knitter? How can a person who has knit multiple Christmas gifts, and has become the felting queen in our circle of knitters not feel like a "real knitter?" She is a real knitter. She has been a real knitter since the first day she borrowed a pair of my needles and cast on her first stitch. She is, for the most part, self taught and only asks for help of the rarest of occasions. We swap yarns and patterns and ideas and we have laughed hysterically when she had a pattern that was so difficult to follow that an entire store of knitters couldn't figure out what the next step was supposed to be. (This didn't slow her down at all, she simply bought a new clog pattern and whipped out a whole new pair in record time.) But, until she had more than one project on the needles, she didn't feel like a real knitter.

I have no idea which of the new projects listed above will be my next new project. But I do know this. Tanya is 100% a real knitter. There's no doubt about that. So I ask, what is a "real knitter" to you?

5 comments:

  1. I like Tanya's idea of a real knitter, what a way to justify my having so many wip! That, and having lots of yarn tucked away in many, many places, and unmatching knitting needles. :)

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  2. I'm not sure when I started to feel like a 'real knitter'. In fact, there are days I'm still not sure that I am!

    But I do know that I love that blue you have set aside for the Herbivore.

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  3. I only started knitting in November last year and there's no way I feel like a "real knitter". Yet, folk often question the truth of my inexperience and my wife, who's knitted since childhood, thinks I've overtaken her :S I guess that, as in all things, it's a matter of opinion ;)

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  4. It's all a matter of who you are comparing yourself to. No one in my family knits, so I am the knitter in the family. However, compared to some folks on Raverly who design and create, I would describe myself as someone who knits.

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  5. i would describe myself as some one that knits..
    i hope to be a real knitter one day :)

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