Monday, January 22, 2007

Stitch 'n' Bitch Samplings, Part the Second

So, the Weaving Works group wasn’t a group and wasn’t interesting. In a broader artsy vein, I attended the First Ever General Meeting of a friend’s planned crafting event.

It was good. There was a debacle involving dead car batteries (not mine) which caused me to hole up there longer than planned, but there was also glass-etching, metal-etching (by electrolysis, which has the exciting ability to kill you), some knitting, and:


Yes, perler beads. Sadly, the peg boards were too small and the colors too limited for the pacman ghosts to be historically accurate (they should have more… ectoplasmic skirt ripples, and the green one is pink, honest), but my personal streak of geek still reigned at an all-time high amongst the contact paper and exacto knives of other crafts.

By all qualifications, it was a good time, although it didn’t really fit my desired stitch 'n' bitch standards. I was the most developed knitter there by a high margin, which definitely shapes the group dynamic . . . an ego-boost, not that I need one, and it followed that I ended up doing a fair share of teaching. I don't mind teaching, as such: the long-tail cast-on truly ought to be spread to the masses, after all. The problem is this:

In case the image is too small: my normal knitting technique has me reaching in with the left needle, looping the yarn around with the left index finger, and dragging the new stitch onto the left needle. It's a weird and probably ill-advised method that's forever making me reverse and recalculate patterns. I developed it because I'm so dominantly left-handed that I could almost forget about having a right hand for a week or two. So, every time I teach someone, I revert to Continental, which makes my head hurt and my right hand cramp up after only half an hour or so... but saves my hapless pupils from similar headaches (their hands presumably won't cramp up) when they first pick up a written pattern. This makes teaching literally physically painful, alas. Not sure how much of it I can tolerate, although I am baited by the promise of a future full of crazy crafts.


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