She came into the yarn store asking for advice on her current project. It was her second project ever and she was knitting a lovely hat for her boyfriend for skiing. She told me she thought it looked a "little big". I agreed it looked plenty big, far too big for a hat. She sighed and agreed and asked what she could turn it into instead of a hat. This blew me away. she didn't get upset. She didn't start frogging, she wanted to know what her wip (work-in-progress) could become instead of what it originally had been slated to be. I looked at it and came up with a couple ideas-a capelet perhaps? She liked that idea and mentioned that she had some young nieces and nephews. I suggested she could cast it off and sew an elastic around the top and make a cute little wool skirt. She liked this idea too. I then suggested we put it it on a larger needle to see how big it really was. I told her this was very advanced knitting and she was already into her designing phase of knitting-very impressive. The project was scrinched onto a 12 inch circular and looked like a giant hair scrunchy. I grabbed a 60" needled and started transferring stitches. We ended up with this
If you look closely you can see the stitches are kind of scrunched on the 60" needle. That means the project has to be at least 70 inches, possibly 80.
There are no words to describe how much this amused me. I was no longer able to be understanding and sensitive and I started laughing so hard I thought I was going to hurt myself...
Kristina took this all in good stead. She laughed too. After wiping the tears from my eyes I made the only suggestion I could thing of. "It's a circular scarf." She really liked the idea and she was excited that she had knit a scarf for herself. "Perfect for skiing!" she said. She also said when she was done casting off she would pick up another skein of yarn to retry knitting a hat for her boyfriend.
The reason why her scarf was so big was she had cast on 96 stitches, which was a perfectly reasonable amount. But she had just learned how to purl, so every time she switched from purl to knit stitches and vice versa on the ribbing she did a yarn over. On top of that her gauge was really loose (unusual in a novice and I think it points to her being a fantastic knitter in the future) she ended up with 312 sts knit in a really loose gauge on 5.5 mm ndls.
Kristina also told me that she was going to measure her stitches and see how many stitches she should actually cast on to make a normal sized hat. I thought that was AWESOME. She immediately understood a basic concept of designing with her second project knitting ever. This woman is destined to become a great knitter!
As she was leaving I told her "You know, people are going to stop you and ask you where you got that scarf because it's going to look fantastic and you can say 'Thank you, I designed it myself." She laughed and looked a littl e sheepish and said, "You know what's really funny? I'm a graphic designer..."
2 comments:
Great knitting story. It's nice to see you spending some time at the Twist.
That's freakin awesome!! Just looking at that picture I started laughing so hard. "It looks a little big for a hat." ROFLMAO!!!!
Post a Comment