LoopyKnits

Lists are easier to read than paragraphs, rights? Here are a few snapshots of who I am in my personal/professional life:

• happily married woman
• mother of one teen and one elementary-age child
• “mom” to an elderly Sheltie named Banjo and two half-grown kittens named Nibbles and Larry
• Tennessee resident
• technical writer
• hand knitter
  (as opposed to a machine knitter — although I wouldn’t mind having a knitting machine too!)
• former writer/editor for newspapers, magazines, and three trade paperback books
• blogger (you guessed that, right)
• unpubbed fiction writer

Here are a few more quick glimpses of me as a knitter:

• I learned a basic knit stitch as a young girl but forgot most of it in the years between then and my early 40s when I picked it up again.
• I can read either a text-based pattern or one that uses a chart (although I’m much less experienced with charts).
• Most parts of knitting are still scary-new to me, like piecing together a garment, and I’m still wrestling with GAUGE. (Any wonder that GAG U is part of that word?)
• But I can knit the hell out of socks, scarves, hats, etc.
• I try to learn at least one new skill per knitting project, such as a new cast-on, experience with a different type of yarn, a new stitch, etc.
• The first sock I tried to knit, ever, was toe up and started with a twisted-8 cast-on, and it was lace. In a self-patterning yarn, which made it harder to spot my errors. I went through 20 versions of that darned sock until I finished it. Whereupon I learned it was too small to fit over my heel. (Apparently, my gauge changes when I’ve just ripped out some knitting for the nth time and have knit it again, tensely. Never occurred to me that my yarn tension would change with my mental tension. Lesson learned.)

Also see:

• KIP Watch
• Likes and Dislikes
• The Bio category in my sidebar for recent “me-me-me” posts