Kris Awesome

The September goal roundup:

1. Complete at least the yoke for Eris – Done! I’m now partway through the hem.
2. Finish tipless gloves – Not done. Would have been finished if my perfectionist streak hadn’t kicked in, though.
3. Finish Shimmer – Not done. I did re-swatch for it, at least.
4. Re-start (yet again) Lotus Blossom and complete at least one chart – Done! I’m partway through Chart 2.
5. Hold off on pipeline projects until completing at least one WIP – Not done. I started FPS and didn’t finish a thing.
6. Draft a pattern for toe socks – Done! It’s a rather rough draft, but it’s a draft nonetheless.
7. Work only with stash yarn – Done!

As you can see, I didn’t do so well with my goals last month. But I tried, I really did.

And now, the goals for this month.

1. Finish tipless gloves
2. Finish Eris
3. Work on FPS and get through at least tier 10
4. Work on Lotus Blossom and get through at least chart 4
5. Work on Shimmer
6. Start toe socks
7. Start Channel Pullover
8. Start cable-and-bobble hat
9. Start cabled purse

Whew. Bit of an ambitious month here. But it’s not impossible. Besides, if my third year at UCSD is any indication (um, how many units did I take while having two jobs, extracurriculars, and an active social life?), I kind of thrive on having too much going on.

I favor right-handed knitting, which makes sense because my right hand is my dominant hand. And I knit right-handed continental, because I learned how to crochet first. (I only remember teaching myself to crochet days before I taught myself to knit, but I recently discovered that I’d been shown how to do it as a very small child.) Ah, the joys of muscle memory.

However, I’m not completely right-side dominant. My right eye is the dominant eye, but I’m left-foot and left-ear dominant. So it’s probably not surprising that, despite my right-handedness, I can train my left hand to do certain tasks.

Months ago, I learned how to knit back, because I was sick of turning and purling. (It’s not that I think it’s hard, it’s that it’s slower.) And it worked beautifully. After that success, I figured, “why not learn to knit entirely left-handed?”

So I did.

I make a distinction between knitting/purling back and actually knitting left-handed, because the stitches get oriented differently. When I knit or purl back, the leading leg is in the front and on the right, trailing leg is in the back and to the left – because that’s how the knit stitches are oriented when I do right-handed continental.

However, when I knit true lefty, I knit combined. I think. I say this based on how I wrap the yarn and how the stitches are oriented. But I haven’t been able to find a lot of information on it, so I don’t know if the hand you hold your yarn in matters. (I hold the yarn in my left hand; I tried left-handed continental once and that was a miserable failure.) I’m not quite sure why I knit lefty combined instead of English, but hey, whatever works, right?

At some point, I’m going to try knitting an entire project left-handed, though that may require a bit of mental gymnastics on my part. It should be a fun exercise…