Haute Revel

I first picked up the sticks in about January of 2010, but I only began logging my knitting progress on February 9th, 2010, in my first post at Knitravel: Knitters Delight.

4 years later, I’ve decided to do an anniversary look-back at my annual posts around this time for the past 4 years, as a way to track my progress with this hobby.

In Knitters Delight, I was trying out a legwarmer pattern. I had so much difficulty keeping that pattern straight, I gave up on it and never finished the pattern. Looking back, this is amusing to me now, because it was so freaking easy, but I had so much trouble with it! I would knit a few rows, find a dropped stitch, flip out in complete exasperation, undo my work, and try again – and repeat. Highly frustrating. Not to mention, the yarn I bought was the cheapest yarn I could find (as, when I arrived at the knitting shop the first time, I was absolutely floored by how ridiculously expensive most yarns were – I’ve since come to accept the high costs involved in this hobby!), and therefore extremely unpleasant to work with, especially with my dry, cracked hands caused by our skin-destroying Canadian winters and North American diets.

Apparently, I only published 3 posts in 2010. I suppose I didn’t do too well that year, and mainly concentrated on learning the craft, rather than writing about it.

My first post around this time in 2011, was from March 28 – reviewing my Coachella. I was semi-satisfied with the result of that project – the final piece looks fantastic on its own, but doesn’t quite fit the way I wanted it to. It tends to slump – it’s basically just slightly too large in the middle front. Maybe I’ll grow into it… 😛 Stitch-wise, there doesn’t seem to be any mistakes in it, and I loved the yarn – it feels just like suede, as it’s meant to! And the colours are two of my favourites – teal and berry.

Fast-forward another year, the beginning of my 3rd, to Febuary 10th, 2012, and we have the photo shoot of the first item I knit from a pattern I designed / created from scratch: Sundae Warmer Photo Shoot. At this point, I was finding knitting to be a total breeze – I was even so bored with just knitting other people’s patterns, I started to create my own. And while this one is really basic, it gave me the confidence to begin something a little more complex: namely, an adult version of the ruffle yarn skirts I see all over the place for babies.Why should babies have all the fun!

And, at the beginning of my 4th year of knitting, on February 14, 2013, I was so confident with knitting, I decided to begin some experiments – and posted about Felting Experiment #1: Freeform Desert Throw.

Finally, at the beginning of my 5th year of knitting, I started off with quite the slew of finished projects – which bodes well for the coming year. I look forward to coming up with new designs for my Etsy shop, nailing down a few more pattern PDFs, and working on building up my knitting skills – not to mention launching my yarn shop, yarn crawl hotel bookings, and – finally – releasing my Android Ravelry knitting app, KnitKapp.

There’s something about even-numbered years – I just like numbers divisible by 2. Some kind of harmony to them, I suppose. Odd numbers just seem… so odd! So 2014? It’s going to be an AWESOME year. I won’t let it be any other way!