WIP Wednesday: Knitting with Sticks!

I know I haven't posted anything in a while, but there really hasn't been much going on.  I haven't been feeling very well and just didn't feel like doing much.  Oh and I read like 6 books, which sort of took up all my free time.  This weekend I decided it was time to get back on the horse.  I purchased a craftsy.com course called Knit Lab to learn how to knit.  You may remember that I love to crochet, and I started my adventure in yarncraft with loom knitting but now I am attempting to learn how to knit with needles!

My first attempt at the keyhole scarf project from the class was kind of a horrible mess and I ended up ripping it all back out, threw the needles on the table and left it alone for a few days and worked on some other things.  Today I got my courage back a little bit and started again.  So far I think it's going OK.

I also decided to make some changes from my first attempt.  The first was needle length.  I started with a set of 14 inch needles because that's what I had.  A nice hand me down set from my husband's aunt.  There is nothing wrong with long needles, but when you are working on a project that is about 4 inches wide and are coming from the land of 7 inch crochet hooks it's easy to see why all that extra length just sort of got in the way and made it that much more difficult for me to learn how to manipulate the needles to get the right result. For the second attempt I decided to go with much shorter 9 inch needles and it has made a world of difference let me tell you!  I don't feel like I'm doing the funky chicken every time I move them around!

I also switched the material that my needles were made from.  The first set were aluminum, which again there is nothing wrong with that, but of the three types of materials knitting needles (and crochet hooks) are generally made from, metal is the "fastest" of the three.  For those of you not in the know, this just means the speed at which the yarn moves across the needles and how much resistance they meet.  Metal is slick (at least from the yarn's perspective) and therefore for a novice it can be a bit tricky to learn on.  I dropped a lot of stitches and spent most of my time trying to save them rather than actually knitting. This time I switched to bamboo needles, as wood is on the slower end of the materials which has allowed me to focus on the knitting more and not worry so much about whether the next stitch is going to try to jump off the end of the needle.  I haven't dropped one stitch this go around!

Finally I switched from an expensive wool camel blend yarn to a cheap acrylic.  I know, I know, blasphemy!  But honestly this was more to do with my guilt factor than anything else.  I just hated destroying my good yarn on what essentially is a freaky science project gone wrong.  I really don't care if I "waste" some of the other stuff.

Overall, I am very pleased with my progress thus far and like anything else, it's going to take time, patience, and practice to master this new  skill but I think I'm up to the challenge.  It will be a while as I am still extremely slow and have some other partially finished projects calling my name, but I can't wait to show you my pictures when it's done!