Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Jack Frost is Making Some Warm Blankets

  This yarn appeared at K&CC at a perfect time.  I had received some green yarn from one of the ladies at Monday knit-night and was going to use that for a blanket I had in mind.  Before I cast it on I changed my mind on the pattern.  While trying to decide if I had enough yarn of another color for the first pattern, this one showed up on Saturday.  There is definitely enough and I love the color.
  I'm glad that I went with a nice and easy pattern right now.  The one problem with working on a costume and putting off some of your work is that it won't magically get done and it is easy to get behind.  Luckily it hasn't become too busy yet, so I'm not too far behind.  One thing that doesn't help is that we are trying some new things, but if those things go smoothly, it will be easier in the long run.  I'm also working on a How-To Guide for everything so I won't have to do what Linda did when she retired from the job and I took over.  She wrote me a list of things to do in order, but as she was getting to the end of the list she remembered things she had forgotten.  The list went from being in order to being a bit jumbled.  I am keeping a file going and as I do something I am making sure to include it.  Hopefully that will keep me from skipping any bits that I just do without having to think about.

  Dawn told me that I was going to teach a class using this new-to-Jo-Ann-Fabrics-yarn.  It is fuzzy yarn with loops built in so you don't need to know how to knit or crochet to make things with it.  I thought that sounded fun and looked at the pattern that I was supposed to teach.
  The pattern was to make an infinity cowl.  That sounded fun so I looked at the instructions.  The first instruction was to count 109 loops.  That is when I knew we were not going to be following those.  The class is only about 2.5 hours and I knew a lot of that would be to count to 109.  I also knew from playing around with it that someone would need to get a few rows in before it was stable enough to be moved.

  This was what I had them work on.  It is 12 stitches wide and I made them turn it over each row so they learned how to do both knit and purl stitches.  There were many instances where they had to take out some stitches because something went wrong and had to take some out.  One of my students got about half-way done, another got about 3/4, and the last actually got her whole scarf done.  This makes it a pretty quick project and only used about one skein.
  Dawn mentioned to them about the pattern that they were supposed to learn and they all agreed that the cowl pattern sounded like a cool idea, but that it sounded way too hard for a first project.