Incoherent Scribblings

Crafting Chez Renée

I must profusely apologize for failing to post anything for the past two days. I haven’t completely failed in my Holidailies commitment yet, but unless I get some serious inspiration in the next few days I fear that I might.

As is the norm for weekends chez Renée, I spent most of the past weekend crafting. However, this weekend instead of cross stitching, I knitted. You can read about my (mis)adventures here. (Yes, this is another shameless redirect (plug!) for my stitching blog!)

A Stitcher Who Knits

I haven’t been cross stitching very much for the past couple of days. I put a few hours into Nicki’s RR, but to be honest, after finishing Vash’s RR last Wednesday I was ready to start a new project.

Since I am still waiting for fabric and beads for “Celtic Spring,” I was going to start “Catch the Wind,” but unfortunately, my plans were foiled. Even though I had almost all the colors I needed, I just so happened to be missing the colors needed to start in the center! I briefly considered starting at a corner, but then changed my mind since we all know that when I don’t start in the middle I get my project off-center every single time!

It was at that point that I decided maybe a break from cross stitching for a day or two wouldn’t hurt, so I picked up my knitting. I started by continuing to work on my scarf, but for some reason, ever since I finished the second skein of yarn on it I have had doubts about it.

The first thing that I noticed was that I was getting bored repeating the knit, knit, purl and wasn’t sure that I would be able to make it through four more skeins of yarn. Shortly after I admitted that I was bored with the pattern, I realized I had dropped a stitch and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out exactly where. I then started getting grumpy and complained to myself that it was silly for me to be knitting a scarf when I have at least five perfectly good scarves in my closet. At that point, I walked away from it.

After thinking things over for a few hours I decided that I would rather have an afghan instead. However, instead of tackling a full-sized afghan, I decided that for the time being I would rather knit small things that I can finish quickly and use to learn a variety of different techniques. As a result, I ripped the scarf apart decided to use the yarn I bought for it to knit a bunch (not sure how many yet) of blocks/squares and eventually sew them together into an afghan.

The above example is called a Seed Stitch/Basketweave Square and is the first square in what I hope will one day turn into my first knitted afghan. The seed stitch was used as the square’s border and as the name suggests, the pattern that appears on the inner part of the square resembles a basket weave. It is approximately eight inches square and I really love the way the basket weave pattern shows up!

I think that for those of us that enjoy both stitching and knitting you are either a knitter who stitches or a stitcher who knits. I would venture to say that I will always be the latter because even though I have really enjoyed knitting the past couple of days I must admit that after a trip to my LNS to pick up floss today I am really itching to get back to stitching tomorrow!