I knit now?

I’m not entirely sure I needed another yarn-based hobby, but here we are. I absolutely love crochet. The repetitive movements and the counting are somewhat of a meditative experience for me, but I could tell I was beginning to lose that hyperfocus. So naturally, the next logical step was to learn an entirely new fiber art.

Knitting has been sitting somewhere in the back of my mind for a while. I love the things I can make with crochet, but when it comes to clothes, there’s something about knitted fabric that I kept coming back to. And I was born with the ‘I guess I could just try’-gene.

So, a couple purchases later, I was armed with a set of interchangeable needles, the book Knit How by Meghan Fernandes & Lydia Gluck and enough audacity to severely overestimate what I could do with them.

Maybe start with a scarf, they said

I did briefly attempt to make a scarf. I cast on, started working back and forth in stockinette and quickly discovered that I was bored to shit. I needed a bigger challenge.

The ‘scarf’ now lives in a canvas bag at the bottom of my yarn tote. I made it through about 25 cm before deciding that knitting was going to need to be a bit more interesting if we were going to get along.

Anyone in the online fiber arts space knows PetiteKnit, of course. But the Sophie scarf wasn’t going to cut it for me either. I kept seeing the Cloud Blouse and Cloud Sweater pop up in my algorithm. An oversized boxy fit, that cute rolled neck detail, the way it looks simple enough in construction that it wouldn’t make me want to pull my hair out, sign me up.

Did I understand the pattern when I bought it? Absolutely not.

This may be a terrible idea, but that has never stopped me before. So it was me, the pattern and YouTube University against the world.

Fine, I’ll swatch

The fun part about my crochet projects is that I have never felt the necessity to make a gauge swatch. Since I mostly make decor, accessories or amigurumi, a little smaller or bigger isn’t that big of a deal. Somehow, I felt like that would not fly the same way in knitting. And unfortunately, I was right.

I started with the needle size I thought would work, made my little square, measured it and was nowhere near where I needed to be. Fine. Bigger needles, another go.

It took a couple of tries, but I eventually got there. I had to use bigger needles than expected, which initially felt suspiciously like I was doing something wrong (and still kind of does).

This was also when I learned that making the swatch isn’t actually the end of making the swatch. You then have to wash it, block it, wait for it to dry and then measure it. There is something particularly rude about having to wait for your practice square to dry when all you want to do is start the actual sweater.

Annoyingly, I get the whole swatching thing now. If I’m going to spend an unreasonable number of hours making a sweater, I’d quite like the end result to fit an actual human. Ideally me.

I actually know some of this

Previous crochet knowledge certainly came in handy in starting the pattern. Patterns work much the same way, just with a different set of abbreviations to learn.

I’d also done enough stockinette practice by this point that the actual knitting and purling felt pretty comfortable. It was the new techniques (German short rows… AAAAAHH) that needed some outside assistance. Whenever I came across something I hadn’t done before, it was off to YouTube University or TikTok for a quick demonstration before trying it myself.

And, somewhat annoyingly for anyone hoping this story would involve a dramatic knitting disaster, that worked pretty well.

There have definitely been moments of staring at my needles wondering whether what I’d just done was actually correct, but for the most part, seeing a technique demonstrated once or twice has been enough to replicate it. Crochet probably deserves some credit here too. The motions are different, but being used to working with yarn, keeping tension and figuring out where things are supposed to go makes it feel a lot less like starting completely from scratch.

There are probably tons of mistakes that I just can’t see yet, but I am making progress and an actual sweater shape is starting to appear.