Blog Surfing.

Sigh. The last few days I\’ve been perusing the many knitting blogs out there. I\’ve alternately been feeling inspired by and jealous of all the wonderful knitting I\’ve seen. So many people are making wonderful sweaters and other projects and all I keep doing are ponchos and scarves. Maybe it\’s time to try something more complicated. Maybe I\’d better master the continental knitting first. I think part of it is that I\’m so used to crochet where fingers and hook fly along at lightening speed. Even though I\’ve been knitting for a few years now, it\’s still a pretty slow and labor intensive process for me. I\’m hoping switching knitting styles really helps.

On the needles….

Right now I have two projects that I\’m alternating between while I practice knitting continental style. First is a basic garter stitch scarf made from Polarspun for my younger son. It\’s actually coming along fairly well. I have the knit stitch down and it goes pretty smoothly, but I\’m still not happy with my tension. The loops are fairly tight on the needles, like they were way back when I first started knitting.

The second thing I\’m working on is the Microspun poncho. It is just *ok*. I\’ve made a few obvious mistakes in it, but I\’m really not in the mood to frog the whole thing. I\’ve already ripped it out once, and the thought of doing it again makes me cringe. It\’s done in stockinette stitch and while I think I have the purl motions down, again my tension is off. This one is pretty tight too and difficult to slide on the needles.

I\’m not too sure how to fix the tension problems except to keep plugging away. If I continue to make mistakes in the poncho I\’m going to have to pull the whole thing out because everytime I look at it I will see those twisted stiches and it will drive me crazy. *Sigh* I hate making mistakes and I hate ripping out. Just can\’t win.