Can I talk about knitting for a minute here?
So I’ve been crocheting for quite a while now, and as much as I love it I’m constantly frustrated by all the awesome patterns that I see that are knitted. There are just more patterns for knit that crochet.
So I finally decided to take the plunge and learn to knit because I want to make cool stuff. I thought about just buying a single pair of needles to practice with, but I know from crochet that you need a bunch of different sizes to make different projects. Besides, I learn best by practicing on projects rather than just making rectangles of different stitches. So to save time and a little money I bought a big set of straights, I also bought a set of circular needles because I wanted to be able to work on hats and things. And then I was ready to go!
I WAS NOT BLOODY READY TO GO
I turns out that this was not nearly sufficient enough for learning to knit. The first thing that I made was from a book I bought for learning to knit, basically you knit a rectangle and then sew up the sides to make a hat type thing. Except it’s not quite that simple, because as it turns out most projects need to be blocked once you’re done making them. I did not know about blocking, since it’s not something that’s ever come up in crochet. Apparently knitting something the way that you’re told to is not good enough to make it the shape that you want it to be, you have to dampen in and pin it into the right shape and leave it to dry this way.
But okay, fair enough. I can do that. It’s a little more work than I’m used to but It’s just part of the knitting process. That’s fine. I worked on a few more little projects on straights, before I decided to work on a hat made in rounds. So I busted out my 4.5 mm circulars to work on this hat
EXCEPT THAT THEY AREN’T THE RIGHT LENGTH CIRCULARS. Apparently you can’t just by them in different widths like I did, NO. You need circulars in a bunch of different lengths so that you can get the right circumference for that hat/whatever the hell you’re working on. You literally cannot knit if your circulars are too long, like mine are.
“but Carla, why don’t you just knit using double pointed needles? Or just use two circular needles?” BECAUSE I DIDN’T ORDER DPNS, and since I didn’t know enough about knitting to know I’d need more than one of each size of circulars.
Okay, so these problems aren’t that hard to fix. I’ve ordered some Double pointed needles, I’m going to learn how to use those as well. It’s just that you need SO MUCH CRAP to knit. Straight needles, circulars - in different widths AND LENGTHS, double points, bloody CABLE NEEDLES if you want to do cable patterns. How the hell is anyone who’s just starting out knitting supposed to know that you need SO MANY DIFFERENT KINDS OF NEEDLES to work with? It makes starting to learn so much harder.
Do you know what you need to crochet? some yarn, a few different sized hooks and maybe a needles to sew things up. It’s so easy. I never thought knitting would be super complicated, by you need so many things just to get started.
Okay, I know this all sounds really dumb, and experienced knitters are probably tsking at the screen going “What do you want? It’s not like it was deliberately made to be difficult, that’s just how the laws of physics work”. I get that, okay? I really do. I’m just frustrated and wanted to scream about it for a while. Get away from my posts with your judgey eyes and condescending remarks, I’m allowed to be frustrated, I just spent the last two hours trying to trick my circulars into being short enough for this hat I wanted to make because I don’t want to wait for my double points to show up. And I hate that it worked.
TL;DR KNITTING IS INSANELY CONVOLUTED. It’s like Minecraft, you need to know everything about it to start doing it and I’m so mad about it.
