I kind of miss being able to deduct reruns of "Married with Children". I learned so much about lighting from watching the way Al Bundy's bald spot was carefully back-lit from every angle. It brought so much confidence to my work realizing that if you could shoot the back of someone's shoulder from an interesting enough angle, any actor could play the menacing killer in a televised re-creation of a crime.
Now I need something else to justify countless hours spent staring at HBO re-runs, so I thought I would try and take up knitting. After all, there's only about 50 books on knitting and crocheting on the New Non-Fiction rack when I go to the town library, so at least if I needed to learn from a book it would be easy. I'm not even going to address the whole "Celebrities who knit" phenomenon. Suffice to say that the last time I cared what Kristen Dunst does while she's waiting on set was on "Mona Lisa Smile" when I had to wrangle cable around her. Besides, I think every woman needs to have at least one "girly" hobby to balance out all the extreme sports and other crap we tend to get suckered into. So I googled "learning to knit", printed out some pictures of the steps, and went to the craft store.
The site that I went to said that the basics to get started would be #8 knitting needles 14" in length, a small pair of scissors, worsted yarn medium weight and a yarn needle. I got to AC Moore on a really warm Saturday afternoon and found the knitting aisles jam packed with sweet little old ladies trying to locate just the right kittens and/or puppies-themed sweater pattern for their next great-grandchild. The knitting needles were clumped by brand in little islands through-out the knitting section so it took me about 15 minutes to find the pre-requisite #8, 14" needles. They looked like something Zhang Ziyi would use to fight off a horde of Mongolian bandits. Yarn needles were not in the sewing aisle. Eventually they were located in the knitting tools rack, deep in the heart of Yarn Country, being guarded by a bored 7-year-old who had apparently not been given her daily dose of Ritalin. I reached over her one woman performance of "Unicorn Princess Pony Saves the Day" and grabbed whatever said Yarn Needle in the biggest type. Now all I needed was to find some basic yarn.
This was like telling a woman to go into DSW and walk out with a pair of basic black pumps. There were 3 aisles of yarn, as well as, two floor to ceiling wall units stuffed with yarn along the wall. The only problem was that what looked like Medium yarn came in either black or day-glo reds and pinks. I wanted to knit something simple like a baby blanket and I couldn't picture swaddling the baby-to-be in black and nuclear red and day-glo pink. Finally I found a rainbow tie-dye yarn that said MEDIUM, WORSTED and one in a non-blinding rose. $22.10 and I was on my way home to learn how to knit.
I realized after a few minutes that who-ever had written the instructions I had printed out, had obviously never seen one of those "how to tie a knot" diagrams. There were drawings of a section of yarn in what looked like some kind of Book of Kells configuration, but no indication of which end came from where. Slip knot was easy enough to understand, but terms like "Purl" and "Casting on" were making me wish that there was some kind of "Rent-a-granny" service that one could call when faced with things like knitting and baking bread. During an episode of The Sopranos I managed to wrestle about 12 inches of yarn in some kind of configuration around my left knitting needle. I sat there looking at it thinking; "What now?"
I was under the mistaken impression that knitting was a process that had been set in stone for millenia and that there was one, inexorable way it was done. As I looked at my left needle and then back at the picture labelled "Basic Knit Stitch" I realized what the difference was. The needle in the picture had several neat rows of stitches dangling off it. My needle had one sorry-looking tangle of pink yarn secured by a shaky slip-knot. How did the extra rows come into being? Apparently, after I checked a couple of other websites, there were as many methods to "basic knitting" as there were kinds of yarn. One site would tell me to cast on one way, one site would have a slight variation, one site would be completely different. I tried a couple of different methods to transfer the cast-on stitches to the right needle to get a row going, but then remembered that our office Mummeleh is one of those people who sits on the commuter rail and makes afghans, I packed a knitting bag and hauled everything into the office to ask her. Turns out she only does Crochet, but at least she pointed me to a decent website.
Maybe this one will work. I need to do something constructive with my time while I'm watching 24 tonight.
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