double-pointed demons

I thought I'd try knitting in the round with double pointed needles again tonight. It's not going quite as badly as it did the first time I tried, so that's encouraging, but it's still very awkward. Did people really ever knit sweaters this way? Craziness.

The Harry Potter scarf is coming along very nicely, but right now I'm really, really sick of doing the same stitch over and over again so I'll be happy when it's finished. I have three and a half stripes left, and then I have to block it and add the tassels.

Haha...block it...look at me use knitting-words...I feel so inexperienced as a knitter, because I am (so why even say it? I don't know). People start writing articles about shoulder shaping and which gods you have to pray to to get your gauge right and how many alpaca it takes to make a skein and I just hide under my desk and stockinette stitch my scarves, feeling inadequate. Now, I know that all it will take for me to get over this is to actually start swatching and knit a sweater, but since I don't have the resources to do that just yet, I bite my nails about it in the mean time. Also, I'm fairly sure you don't have to spin your own yarn to get into knitting heaven (I hope, because spinning makes me think of this fairy tale book I had as a child that had, for the story of Sleeping Beauty, a particularly gruesome and scary depiction of the evil fairy and her spinning wheel...and...yeah...*shudder*).

In my last post I mentioned a very ugly blanket that I frogged. When I inherited my cat I also inherited her cat carrier and the blanket that came in it. It was a crocheted blanket of many different colours that looked like they had been the remnants of skeins that someone wanted to get rid of. Now, I can understand wanting to get rid of little bits of yarn, and I can understand being so desperate to make something that you will knit or crochet ANYTHING, but this blanket was still a crime of colour. It was ugly. I can't say it any better than that.

Anyone who's paid their own way through university, as I am doing, understands that sometimes you have a lot of extra cash and sometimes you owe people (friendlies such as phone companies and landlords) cash that you don't have. This was during a time most resembling the latter situation, so I couldn't even remotely afford to go buy yarn, but I was desperate-so very desperate-to knit SOMETHING.

And so, my eyes fell upon the ugly blanket, and I saw the potential...if the colours were arranged differently...if some colours were completely eliminated...there could be such beauty...

So I frogged that sucker. I frogged it dead. And now I have a ridiculous number of silly small bits of yarn that I'm still not sure what to do with.