I recently started going to church again and one of the ladies there invited me to a group of crafters. It was wonderful, first, to get out and get involved in a group of like minded people and second to learn some new techniques and have new ideas presented to me. One of those ideas were the knitting looms called Knifty Knitters. I had a friend who used them years ago and I kind of did a stuck up sort of response where I encouraged her, but thought I would never use them myself. I guess it falls under the "never say never" category. My biggest reason for not buying them was because I thought they were pretty much just for knitting hats. I was wrong. Turns out there are a bunch of things they can be used for and there are also a lot of different types of stitches that can be made with them.
But I think the best reason for using them is this: Usually when my hands start hurting I have the choice of suffering with the pain or stopping my knitting. The looms give me another option and that is to stop one method that uses one set of muscles and movements and switch to another. Well...ok....I already was doing that by switching between knitting and crocheting, but this gives me yet another option. I learned to use them by borrowing my friend, Carol's, but then went to Walmart and bought my own set. The hats work up twice as fast and are pretty nice to look at. I look forward to trying some other things as well with it.
My other knitting news is that I entered a bunch of things into a service auction at the church and hopefully someone will like the things that I volunteered into the raffle so much that they will contact me for making them something.
I've been knitting like crazy lately. Here are a few of my latest items, though not all of them:
This is my usual hand warmer pattern that I revised a long time ago, but this time I used some scrap yarn to put a little color into them. I used Paton's Classic wool for these. The color is called Paprika
This is a sweater pattern I found online called "The 5 hour baby sweater" and can be found here: http://www.bevscountrycottage.com/kp3.html
I used some stash yarn I had. Its a soft worsted weight acrylic yarn.
I'm still working like crazy to sell some of my knitting, but now I'm also working on making some things for charity again and it feels good to do so.
