I took years and years off of knitting: life and priorities change and I must confess that a few years of living in a very small apartment with very active cats made it difficult to have the space to really get into knitting. Anyway, it was really nice to have a hobby sitting on the metaphoric shelf that I could get right back into without a big learning curve.

The interesting thing, I think is in observing is that the hiatus made some subtle changes to the way that I approach knitting things, at least relative to what I remember.

  • I'm less opposed to garter stitch, and have been using little bits of it here and there in some projects.
  • I've gotten much better at wrap-and-turn short rows in stocking stitch., they now look pretty good and I remember them always looking terrible.
  • I knit the yoke of a sweater back and forth, which is a thing that I would have found unimaginable.
  • Knitting plain stocking stitch in the round has always been a great joy of mine, but in the last couple of months I've done it rather a lot, knitting 3, or so, plain sweaters, which I've found quite captivating. I always seemed to feel like I needed some kind of patterning (color work, lace, cables etc) to keep things interesting, and that doesn't really seem to be the case.
  • I've yet to knit anything post-hiatus on needles other than US 0s (which are quite small,) and it doesn't seem to bug me very much. I continue to make progress on projects and rounds with 250-340 (or so) stitches don't seem oppressively long.
  • The problem of having little gaps between the sleeve of a sweater and the body at the "bottom corner," always used to be a big problem, and these days I haven't need to sew up these gaps at all, which is kind of novel.
  • My cast on edges have gotten better: I've managed to get edges that are as elastic as they need to be, and all of the usual problems (a twist, mistakes in rubbing, problems in counting, misjudging the length of the long-tail) haven't been a problem at all.

Of course some things didn't change:

  • I still don't really like to do things that involve knitting rows very much, and would prefer to knit as much as possible in the round.
  • My taste in yarns seems to be heavy on the "boring fine wool" and while I've been looking around at the kinds of yarns that are available and popular, I am (for the most part,) pretty content to stick to the really simple and boring yarn.
  • I haven't yet vanquished a number of old fears/struggles like making an EPS-style sweater that I really like, knitting sleeves from the cuff-up, cardigans. Many of these things are on my list of things to explore more in the future, but we'll see how I fair.

It's all very curious! I'm excited to see if anything else changes!