A brief update

Some how days have slipped past me again without me keeping up on the posts. Mia culpa.

There are some changes coming up soon.
First:
As of Monday Oct 20th, I will be a full time technical support representative for a cell phone company.
This is will be an evening job and during training I will be getting out at 7pm. After training I will be working until 11pm or Midnight and will have either a Saturday or Sunday every week to work.
The drawback of this is that I will not be able to attend most (or maybe any) of the Yarn for Breakfast events. There will be the two month training which will allow for me to be late to the Norfolk event, and the chance I might make one Portsmouth morning event, but that will be it. After training I shall not have the chance to visit with these fine people.
Frankly I won't have much of a life at all, but I will miss going to these events.

Second:
Once I get paid and get all caught up with my debts, I will be able to buy yarn and patterns again!
Since I won't have much of a life, I expect that I can do a bit more knitting and talking online about knitting. That is the theory at this point, so we will see how that works out. Prior experience with my other blog shows that having a life reduces blogging.

Now for a quick update.
Remember I mentioned teaching a friend how to knit? Well we finally got to spend some time together recently. She came over and we spent the day knitting, followed by a lovely dinner my roommate cooked. (He understands that knitters make him stuff and should be fed.)
While she was over she showed me the blanket she is working on. It has the dropped yarn over that is fairly popular right now. Her pattern varies, so it makes waves and bubbles. I looked at what she had done so far and asked, "Do you know how to purl?"
Why did I have to ask? Because she has been busy knitting on her own and looking techniques up online and has been doing just fine at it, or so she told me on the phone. Therefore it did not cross my mind that I might need to teach her more tricks. I had assumed that she was flying along and teaching herself.
Yes, I taught her to do a knit stitch and a yarn over. Yes, she found a pattern that uses yarn overs and takes it another level by dropping the yarn over. She also had a lovely story about searching online and watching knitting videos to figure things out.
I forget now what video she watched, but I think it was only a how to cast off. She did need to cast of while in Alaska and far from my lessons.
My student did not know how to purl and there were purl rows in her blanket pattern. I asked about how she was handling that part. She tells me she has been wrapping the yarn in the other direction, as she figured that was what a purl was.
Yes, that would be two things I needed to explain and teach her about.
By the way, I want to make this one thing as a gift, but I do not understand this 'round knitting' stuff.
Very well, I happen to have a sock on the needles right now. I can explain what I am doing and show you the process. Easy enough.
Oh! Could you teach me to cable? I so want to learn to cable.
Hmmm, cables you say? Haven't successfully done one yet, but I think I can manage. Let me just go into my knitting library and pull out the 365 Patterns a Day calendar and the Knitting Answer Book. That should do it....

So I had a wonderful time and before you know it I had taught her about Eastern Crossed knitting, how to purl, how to knit backwards (it is what I do after all), showed her knitting on dpns, and handed her some yarn and needles to learn cables on. By the time dinner was served, she was comfortably doing stockinette knitting, 2x2 ribbing, a three stitch cable, Six-Stitch Spiral Cables and the Little Pearl Cable.
I even gave her a brief idea of other increases and the many decreases and how to pick up a dropped stitch, with her promise to come to me for more lessons later on.

She has my copy of One Skein Wonders and now will be reading the Knitting Answer Book to help round out her education. I do feel that these are two fundamentals to knitting. A new knitter must read the Answer Book and needs to understand the potential that is in a single skein of yarn.

WIPS:
The sock is on hold as I have been doing online work at home stuff. Thus my hands are on the keyboard more than they are on yarn.
The laundry soap bag got a few more rows on laundry day, so nothing special to report there.
The Domino case has totally stalled out do to engineering flaws.

That wraps up our post for today.
Tune in next time to learn how I deal with multiple projects that all need the same set of needles.