The yarn craze!

Okay, so I've realized that I go through some serious "addicted to doing this craft" phases. One of my recent phases was yarn and perfecting my very basic but ever expanding collection of stitches. I started knitting about 3-ish years ago, I learned from my very talented knitting grandma. It started with some long, stressful, anxious, yet slightly boring days spent in the hospital with my grandpa who had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma.

I started knitting to pass the time, keep my brain active, and spend some wonderful quality time with my grandpa has he battled his way through chemo treatments, noscomial infections, and all those other cancer things.

I started with a dreadful scarf, that the stitches were so uneven and misshaped- but my Mom loved it none-the-less.

So here is a few basic you tube videos to get you started knitting:

The basics and Purling

Once I got that down, I found this wonderful book at Hobby Lobby that would both help me expand my knitting IQ, and give me small manageable projects that will one day become a sampler afghan!

You can find it on Amazon here for pretty cheap! I paid $8.99 at Hobby Lobby.

Here is a sneak peak inside one of the pages that shows some of the completed patterns.

So far I've finished 3 squares and still a work in progress on the 4th. Why Brown you ask? Well long story short, they had large brown skeins on sale for $2, YES $2!!! So $6 dollars later I have a ton of brown yarn. I plan on making the afghan multi-colored with the other skeins shown below.

Close up of work in progress, and by far my favorite pattern yet....

When the book presents a new stitch I'm not certain how to do, I just 'you-tube-it' and after a few trial and error stitches on some left over yarn, I apply it to the afghan squares.

So once I finished my first square I started searching for more patterns, and I literally googled "knit a square" and this amazingly awesome website came up called "knit-a-square"

It is a charity foundation in Africa, that takes 8" knitted or crochet squares from all over the world and makes them into blankets for Orphans or children affected by AIDS. The cause spoke to my heart so I had to whip up a few, and of course tell everyone I knew about the foundation. My grandma plans on making some, as well as some of the women at my church.  I look forward to sending a large box to Africa in the near future. I'll keep you posted.

How can you resist?!?! Knit a square today, make an orphan warm tomorrow!!!

100% wool yarn, on sale = yummy

More fun colors and patterns!!

I love knitting because it is an easy "on the go" craft that I can cram in my purse and work on anywhere....waiting for the oil to be changed at Jiffy lube, down time in between Pharmacology lectures and Intro to clinical science, while watching TV (or in my case Hulu or insant Netflix), and while chatting on the phone to wonderful, yet far away friends/fiancé/family.