Today I had computer lab in the afternoon. It wasn’t knitting day, at least officially. But I had four girls knitting in computer lab at one point where I didn’t have anyone doing computers! I’m so proud of “My Kids.” I really think they are wonderful, and so we have this “Mutual Admiration Society” going on. It is good for us all. My day turns right around when I have a knitter or two in my room.

Two of those four girls are new to knitting this week, plugging away. When they didn’t get things just right, they had no qualms about unraveling the whole thing they had made and starting again. Actually, ripping out knitting *is* sort of fun, if you aren’t attached to the thing you knit!

One of my girls is really getting good at knitting. She does spend time knitting when she is not at Foster Center, and it really shows. Her parents bought her a few books about knitting and she is especially interested in knit/purl textured stitch patterns. She has not done a lot of purling and is not used to counting stitches much, but she is really giving this a good try, doing a moss stitch star with 8 points. She tried doing a knit/purl pattern once before when I had too many kids at once for me to help her well. I think she is going to get it this time.

She is also interested in trying to knit continental style, with the yarn in her left hand. She watches me knit, and I’m fast, and I can talk and knit without looking at what I’m doing. That is pretty intriguing to an 11-year-old girl! She would like to do that also. She tried a little today but was having some trouble keeping tension on her yarn. She may have to figure out a different way to wrap the yarn than I do it (I go over the index finger, under the middle finger, over the ring finger, then under and looped around my pinkie finger). She may not need to do a loop around the last finger as I do, or she may just need some practice, we’ll see.

Plans for the Foster Center open house are coming right along. I have three volunteers already, including the two women, Luann and Jean, who helped me all summer with the CityKidz Knit! program…. and Jane, our local guild president. I’m very grateful for this support, since I truly can not be in two rooms at once and my computer lab will no doubt occupy my time pretty fully. The picture today is the exterior of Foster Center. I think the photo was taken during the beautiful summer of 2001. Notice the lovely early-1920’s brick work.

Also, today I wore my overdyed, tea-stained sox for the first time. I wore them with dark teal pants and they were perfect! The pants have roomy legs, unlike my typical leggings, and so they covered up the stain anyway. I enjoyed wearing them, and was grateful I had been able to figure out a way to make them wearable.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2003 at 11:27 pmand is filed under Knitting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.