Shakespeare Checks In

Hello. I'm Shakespeare. I am going to make an occasional guest appearance on this blog, but I am not a silly chihuahua, so don't expect to see me in some dumb knitted sweater. I prefer to appear nude. Holly has been knitting instead of petting me. I don't approve, but she does it anyway. So she has some projects to show you.
These are my Knitting Olympics projects. As usual, I'm running a bit behind. I think there should be a medal for finishing last--I'm sure I've won it. I made two pair of fingerless mittens and one pair of baby bootees out of one skein of yarn. I think the yarn is called Magico. I hate those half-skeins hanging around, so I try to use up everything. The baby bootees have been given away to a new little sister of my daughter's friend. My daughter and I are wearing the mittens. She says I'm too old for fingerless mittens. Apparently you can only wear them when you're ten. I don't get this as obviously you can have cold hands at any age and I think I might as well warm up in style.

What does this have to do with Knitting?

Nothing. I just like the picture. This is Daughter and Mom (mine, not Daughter's). I was looking for a picture of our dog, but I'm easily distracted and decided to post this one instead.

Learning to Knit

There are so many new knitters these days - when and where did you learn to knit?

I learned to knit because my mother sent me to knitting lessons. I don't know why she did this. She wasn't much of a knitter herself, and judging from her years of comments about knitting in general, I don't think it's a skill she highly values. But this was in the mid-sixties before women's lib, so maybe it was one of those homemaking skills my mother thought I should know.

Anyway, once a week a friend and I would ride our bikes to the local yarn shop for our lessons. We split a ball of yarn, my friend picked the color which I'm sure was called "Barf Brown". The lady at the yarn shop was a bit fierce, so let's just say I didn't find knitting relaxing. But after several weeks of this I managed to produce a strange sixties-style Barf-Brown garter stitch headband. Oddly enough, I kept knitting. I remember knitting a really long and horrible red, white and blue acrylic ribbed scarf for my brother - he actually wore it - and an assortment of hats and some doll clothes.

So since I'm now fifty, I've been knitting most of my life - and I have the stash to prove it. In a few more posts I'm going to have to show you just how old stash yarn can be.

Failure at First Olympics

I'm an expert knitter, but a really bad blogger - so any advise, please pass it on.

That said, now I get to give my results for the KNITTING OLYMPICS . I'm a little behind on this, but then again, I'm hardly ever on time for anything.

You did notice that most Olympic athletes don't medal? Maybe they all have a story similar to mine.

I had a lot of little projects on the knitting agenda, so I entered the biathalon division. I had in mind 1 and 1/2 pairs of fingerless gloves, a pair of baby bootees and my first ever pair of Jaywalker socks. The event started well. I cast on the 1/2 fingerless glove during opening cermonies and finished quickly. I finished the second pair within a few days and cast on the first bootee. Sometime along the way I cast on the first Jaywalker and got the top partially completed. Then disaster struck. During the start of the second week I was lured away from my event and towards an alternate event called "Sledding with Children". This resulted in a run down a hill and over a mogul. I gained speed at an alarming pace and would have been going still, except for that fence. Owww---. Later that night as I was watching Olympic highlights and working on the Jaywalker it was apparant that I had sustained a more serious sports injury than first suspected. I had sprained my right knitting appendage. It was swelling. The Jaywalker knitting, done on size 1 double points and involving many increases and decreases, was quickly making my sports injury painful. So even after an hour or so of ice I had to slow down switched back to the easier event - the simple baby bootees. All went well for the next hour or so - but then as you can plainly see in the above picture, I had a rather shocking equipment breakage.
Some people would say that I'm never knitting with a full pair of needles - but those people would be wrong.
Still, I persevered. I did finish the bootees, but by the time my hand was back up to Jaywalker caliber the Olympics were over. And I really wanted that cool gold medal button too.