Last night I missed the SnB for a DOTs gig. Only for those girls, man, only for them. :-P Won’t go into detail here because that belongs in my personal journal, but while the evening had its high points, I think I’d have had more fun just sitting around and chatting and knitting.
Oh well. Since I can’t work on my sock until I get the CP needles from Jess, I’ve been working on Cozy. It’s going kind of slowly, but I’m almost to the point where I can add another ball in.
I decided that I didn’t like turning my work during a project like this. Flipping a long drapey thing around all the time gets annoying. So I took a cue from my sister and have been working left-handed on alternating rows for about half a ball now. I work the right side rows as written, but now instead of turning and purling, I just knit across moving left to right. It’s pretty fun, actually. It turns out my right hand is just incapable of holding the yarn properly (left-handed yarn holding’s way ingrained into my muscle memory), so at first I tried English, but I ditched that idea early on. Now, I guess it’s basically combined knitting I’m doing when I knit left-handed, from the way I wrap the yarn around the needle. It wasn’t particularly easy at first, because I’m quite a bit farther from ambidextrous than my sister is, but I think I’ve pretty much gotten the hang of it now. I’m not as quick at it yet. But that will come with practice.
It always takes crafting stuff to make me realize that my weak hand isn’t so weak after all. Sure, I use a mouse left-handed most of the time, but other than that I tend to forget that my right hand isn’t uite as dominant as I think it is. A couple of years ago, during macrame projects, I taught myself to do certain knots (eg. “backward” overhand knots) with my left hand, and got to the point where I do those better as a lefty than as a righty. I do those unconsciously now. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do the more complicated stitches left-handed, but hopefully someday I’ll be able to knit and purl with the same skill.
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