On knitting, yarn, and color

So I said I wanted to knit (learn, REALLY learn this time), so last night I got out some plain yarn and a pair of knitting needles and decided to just knit in order to get the hang of it again. I remembered how to cast on, how to do the basic knit stitch, but had to go look up purl. I kept going, and made some decent rows.

Sort of.

Here’s the catch: trying to relearn knitting while enjoying a cocktail and video chatting with long distance friends via Oovoo does not produce the best work.

I ended up making a hole (no idea how) and my rows kept getting longer…I swear I was not increasing on purpose, as I have no idea right now how to do that…heh.

Can I get an A for effort? :D

I’m surfing knitting blogs today, and as usual I am inspired by so many patterns and colors. I love crazy colorful yarn and what knitting transforms it into. I really want to get some handmade & hand-dyed yarn and some bamboo yarn, although the price tags I’ve seen on some of them are out of my budget at the moment (one of the most beautiful yarns I saw was $95 a skein! OUCH!). But I am completely entranced by gorgeous yarn, like the stuff at Posh Yarn…which is currently completely sold out of everything, so I’m obviously one of many yarn nuts.

I’m going to use the synthetic stuff I’ve got now to practice with, such as this:

I looove these colorful yarns, but not sure what I want to make with them yet. Hrm, maybe one sock out of each to have a lovely non-matching pair…

I’m going to start keeping an eye out for local sources of handmade yarn, such as the farmer’s markets. I’m going to Arizona in two weeks and plan to hit the Phoenix downtown market. Maybe I can pick up some yarn there, too.

And furthering my color love, I picked up some watercolors yesterday. I’ve been dying to play with watercolors, not caring one whit that they are supposed to be so hard to use. I am inspired by how Laurel Burch and SARK and others use watercolors to accent things, getting whisps of bright colors to blend with others. So that’s what I’m going to play around with. I also picked up a color wheel, because despite my complete fascination with and immersion in color, I forget which mixes with what to create this or that. So, now I’ve got a cheat sheet. ;-)

I’ve been doing some sketching, and am going to experiment with watercolors on them. Here’s a recent sketch:

My fingerless gloves are almost done, and I’ll finish them later today (had to buy more yarn),

Amazing that with all the yarn lying about, Bast isn’t interested today: