starting up

Following my last post about buying my materials, I got to work on beginning my project! I will admit – I had to start over 4 or 5 times before actually keeping with it.

This was attempt 1 at casting on – I thought it looked pretty cool, but then as I continued to watch the video, I realized I was VERY wrong. So, I pulled it all off and restarted.

This was attempt 2 – a bit closer to what it should look like, but something was still off.

After a few more unsuccessful attempts at casting on, I actually had to cave and ask for some help from my boyfriends grandma (she is a knitting enthusiast). She helped me do my casting on properly so that I could actually get going on my project. She showed me how she casts on – which is different from the video. I think that having someone right there with you for this step was definitely better than hoping I did it correctly from the video. After my many attempts on my own, I don’t know if my knitting would have worked out if I was relying on the video! When I showed her what I had done, she told me I should restart ?. So now that I got help from someone who really knwos what they are doing, I am much more confident that it will work out.

After I got my casting on figured out, I went back to the video and began my first row which you can see in the photo above. I had to restart this a few times as well – but the casting on got easier the more times you had to redo it!!

I finally got into a groove of doing my next few rows, and then I noticed that it seemed like I suddenly had WAY more stitches than I did on my first row. I started out – as the video had instructed me – with 24 stitches and somehow ended up with 46 on my 4th or 5th row!!! I have seriously no clue how I doubled the amount of stitches in such a short amount of time. Anyways here is a recent update on how it is going:

Because I started over so many times, I decided that no matter how many stitches I now was working with, I was going to continue and see what happens!! It is not perfect by any means, but hey this is my very first project!!

The video that I used for this startup was a bit hard to follow especially since I could not understand how to cast on. Once I was taught how to cast on a different way, I was able to follow the video much easier. I will admit- knitting is harder than you would think. I will continue to give it a shot, but I think that this is something that requires A LOT of practice and restarting.