Knitting with Nathan
So my knitting has taken an immediate detour… I started working on a hat for myself (Eco Alpaca's Charcoal Grey undyed baby alpaca) and it's going well, but Nathan, and Christmas, have side-tracked me.
On the way out of Twist a week ago, Nathan (our 9-year-old) saw some bright orange yarn… orange and blue are his school colors (their mascot is a tiger), and he wanted to make a scarf for a teacher.
So last Saturday, we dropped by Twist to knit and I bought him a couple skeins of Cascade wool yarn in bright orange and a darkish blue. Borrowed the round "hat" weaving looms out of the library and Mona, one of the Twist regulars, taught him how to knit on the loom. We abandoned that little bit of work and left the looms behind, and Sunday I bought a set of "long" ("double-rake") looms at Michael's, since he wanted to knit a scarf, and the Knifty Knitter double-rakes are set to a smaller gauge than the round "hat" looms, which is more appropriate for the worsted weight yarn he picked. I also ordered the Knitting Loom Primer from Amazon Sunday afternoon, and thanks to Amazon Prime's two-day shipping and the book shipping from the Oklahoma warehouse, it arrived yesterday.
So when I got home from work yesterday, Nathan had the book out and had started the scarf by himself. He wasn't far in and was having trouble with getting the wrapping right, so I helped him set it straight and he knit three rows before deciding to play a board game. But he enjoyed it, and likes how quickly it goes, and he's making big plans to make all kinds of things and to learn to knit on needles. I'm just hoping he finishes this project.
While we played the board game, I started a hat with the other skein of yarn that matches his scarf. There are a lot of neat patterns and techniques in the book (dang, you can purl, increase/decrease, cable knit and even do Fair Isle patterns… the makers of knitting looms are under-marketing them) and I figured it was a good idea to get ahead of Nathan a bit, so I could help him when he tried something more advanced and had trouble. And he's more likely to finish his work if he sees me finishing something similar. So I'm making a hat, and I've got another small Christmas project I want to knock out, so my own hat is on-hold for awhile. Which is cool.