Stitchie Day Thursday

Well. Let's see if I can write more or less today. 

I get to slow down, but not till Sunday. LOL

Thursday is a regular stitchie group day. We've gotten a few people to join us and they are mostly knitters. We already had several people in the group who knit. And somedays, we stitchers are outnumbered by the knitters. 

Now way back when I was a wee one, my grandmother taught me to knit. She taught me to crochet. She taught me how to use the old wooden Singer sewing machine. In fact, anything remotely connected to textiles, I first learned about it from my grandmother. It's not that she sat around crafting. She was a working woman her entire adult life. But she was a never-ending bundle of energy and she certainly wasn't going to just sit still after supper and watch television like my grandfather. (Did I mention that I grew up next door to my grandparents? My parents bought the house next door when I was three months old.)

You'll notice that I didn't say that I learned any of these things from my mother. Because the woman could barely thread a needle. She thought the buttoneer invention thingy was a tremendous boon to mankind. Use a piece of plastic to attach buttons. I sewed on my Girl Scout badges. Though my mom did go through a phase where she was knitting slipper sox and that's the only crafty textile thing I remember her doing. 

Decades pass and when I used yarn in that time, it was always with a crochet hook. Never with needles. I gave away every set of knitting needles that I had. I ended up with more, usually acquired with crochet hooks from a yard sale or thrift store. And there those needles sat in a work basket. Unused. And unloved. 

Until recently when someone gave me a mission of knitting a few stitches on a communal piece. 

To practice I pulled out a set of those needles. And a hank of yarn. And even remembered how to do a long tail cast on. But then fumbled about how I used to hold the yarn. It's those 30 years of crochet instead of knitting. (I can date this pretty accurately. The last time I remember using knitting needles was in a scene in The Music Man in 1979.) 

Anyway. I've been working my way back to muscle memory on the whole knitting thing. Even went a bought a pair of nice wooden needles. And maybe even some more yarn. 

I'm not saying this is leading anywhere. But there's so much pretty wool and other stuff out there. All those colors and textures. And it's way faster than stitching, too. 

See. Here's what a couple of days of casual stitching gets me. A little bit of a progress on my rose.