All coming together

I did it!! in my final session I finished my first ever knitted hot water bottle cover!! Yay!

Here's what happened. I had finished casting off, Nicola was better and so our knitting lessons were back on! i was all ready to do the next step - turning this knitted square into a hot water bottle cover. First I had to fold it in half longways - making sure the inside of my fold was the side i wanted on the outside of my cover (basically turning it inside out). I then had troubles - your supposed to have this huge plastic needle when sewing your sides together - i had a regular little sewing needle... But as the creative almost OT that I am I pulled a section of my wool apart as it was made out of 3 strands all woven together. Once i had done that my 'string' was 3 times smaller, and i managed to fit it through my normal sized needle - crisis averted. The next step was relatively easy - all you do is sew the sides together to i made a knot at one end and sewed up the sides - this took a few tries as my 'string' kept falling apart if I pulled on it too hard - but I got there in the end, I tied the finishing knot and turned t back the right way and I had a rectangular pocket! In went my hot water bottle (and phew - the knitting was long enough to cover all of the spout). Then it was ribbon time, I got the ribbon and wrapped the end around my knitting needle, this let me push the ribbon through the knitting with ease. so in and out and in an out I went all around the base of the spout (making sure to cover up my previous calculation mistake) and pulled the ribbon tight - making a squished effect and rippling the spout. Then I tied a bow (in the way that makes the loops on top and strands down the bottom) and Viola! finished!!!!

Apparently according to Nicola I had to name it and so my hot water bottle cover was christened William. :D
Looking forward to my next knitting challenge :)

Casting off: going solo

We've been talking a lot in class about occupational transitioning, disruptions and deprivation - so I thought I'd tie that in here as I recently experienced occupational deprivation regarding my knitting. Occupational disruption is defined by Christiansen & Townsend (2010) as "A transient or temporary condition of being restricted from participation in necessary or meaningful occupations, such as that caused by illness, temporary relocation, or temporary unemployment". -> this in normal terms just means I couldn't have a knitting teaching session because something external to myself had effected my teacher - she got sick - and so for a week I wondered what to do. I was close to finishing my knitting and really wanted to get it done and made but I didn't want to wait another week.. I was so close!! and so I went to the 'old reliable' - Youtube and found a really easy to follow tutorial on casting off (finishing my knitting so that it wouldn't all unravel if I took the needles out). If you want to take a look its linked below :)

So I managed to follow the steps and this is what it turned out like!

I stole a quote - so here's the reference :)
Christiansen, C. H., & Townsend, E. A. (2010). Introduction to occupation; The art and science of living (2nd ed.). United States of America: Pearson Education Ltd. 

Learning the Purl

As you may have gathered from the title of this post, in my latest knitting session I learnt a new stitch called the 'Purl'. This is a nifty little stitch, it's quite like the normal stitch in process - as in stick needle through the hole, wrap wool around, flip and flick it off the end - but it's different in the way your piece of wool sits and which new loop you need to catch. In the normal stitch your wool is at the back of your knitting and out to the side, when purling, the wool it at the front of your knitting, in between the gap in your needles. Also in normal knitting you wrap the wool around the back of the back needle - when purling you wrap the wool around the top, behind that first needle.... 

Now the next confusing thing about this stitch is that you only do the purl stitch in one direction. So I'm purling left to right (and my purl stitches end up on my right needle). BUT when you turn your knitting around and start on your next row you go back to normal stitching. So you purl one way then normal back, and the stitch still ends up as a purl stitch. Don't ask me how it works.. it just does :P Now this is a stitch as a beginner I needed to concentrate fully on, as I would finish my row - I sometimes forgot which stitch I had been doing and so was unsure of what to knit next.. HOWEVER I came up with the easy solution - If the knitting was on my left needle.. and I wanted to purl OR knit, i was to just normal knit back... because then if I had planned to purl, it would... and if i had wanted to knit normally it would carry on :)

Now I apologise if I have completely confused you.. Trust me when i say this is not going to be a blog where you can learn how to knit - this is just me rambling on for the sake of it. BUT..here is a great purling online tutorial I found, (My lesson had finished with my teacher for the day - and I had a complete mind blank on what to do but couldn't put it down.. Youtube is always your friend!)

This is how my purling turned out  :D

Now I decided I wanted to do a ribbed cover so I did normal stitch for a while, then when I learnt purl stitch did that for 4 rows then went back to doing normal stitch for 4 :) - I just had to remember to flick my wool to the back of my knitting when going back to the normal stitch.

Now when I had knitted enough to cover the body of my bottle my teacher (at the next lesson) said I should start vertically alternating my stitches to create a new look for the spout of the cover - I was like oh God really? but then rose to the challenge.. turns out it wasn't too difficult. I only had one blunder to begin with - When Vertically alternating you alternate stitches on the same row and then do the same backwards on your next row.. Here is where your maths calculations come in people! So - I had 52 stitches and so decided to make it even and go 13 knit, 13 purl, 13 knit, 13 purl. Easy enough? well. It was at this point I was getting quite confident in my knitting skills - was thinking I was rising above beginner and then I do something stupid to do with maths and muck up my first alternated line.. in stead of the original plan of 13 13 13 13 I did 10 13 13 16.. I must have though at the beginning i was doing even 10's.. See, you do need to concentrate when knitting!! Oh well, lesson learnt,, and it doesn't look too bad...

Anyway as it's the first line of the neck of the spout it will be covered by a ribbon and a bow :D so no worries.

The Miscalculation of Stitchwork

So there's this think in knitting called 'dropping a stitch', its when a stitch falls from your needle and creates a run in the pattern. It is seen like a horizontal line in the middle of your knitting - it apparently can be 'picked up' if you know what your doing - but most commonly people won't notice the fallen stitch until its too late and it creates a hole in your knitting.

 Well this was my second knitting lesson. Did not go according to plan at all. Suffice it to say with my' amazing knitting skills' I managed to bypass the normal stitch dropping saga and go straight to 'crazy twisted wool patch with extra bubble of wool coming out one side' stitch. I would recount for you what happened, if I saw that I had indeed dropped a stitch first, or if I just did some weird non stitch stitch... however I have absolutely no clue what the hell I did, and so you must be satisfied with a picture below...

I did manage to keep knitting the row I was on even though this patch went haywire; even Nicola (My teacher) had no idea how I had done it.  Hopefully as its near the bottom and towards a corner it won't be seen...We shall see.

Casting on with a String and a Thumb

So I just had my first knitting lesson! It was really fun and Nicola's a really good teacher. We started with 'casting on' which is when you use your thumb, the wool and one needle to get your first row. Well let me just be honest from the get go - it took me 4 tries before I could do the first loop. To start off you have to leave a section of wool before making a loop to put on your needle. Then you have to do this ridiculous thumb string wraparound thing, flick it around and it ends up with another loop on your needle. Tricky stuff. However with patience (mostly on Nicola's part when I kept getting it wrong) and second (and third...and fourth) attempts I managed to start casting on properly... Yay!

Now to make this hot water bottle cover I apparently needed 50 stitches. So 50 of those ridiculous  wraparound thumb flicks - don't get me wrong I consider myself a crafty person at heart anyway but this really confused me.. and anyway I had 4 that I was immensely proud of, but 46 more? it felt like I was at the bottom of Everest (Okay that's a tad dramatic - but you get my point!)  Sitting next to me Ashley was whizzing along fantastically - she got the hang of it much quicker than I did.

With a few more 'oh shits' and 'Nicola what did I do's' I managed to complete my row. Now I knew I needed 50, but by wraparound thingy 40 I was kind of getting the hang of it, and accidentally did 52. Oh well.. So my bottle cover will be slightly larger... Nicola said it wouldn't matter so much, so I breathed a sigh of relief and looked proudly down at my handiwork.... sad to say this one line took about 30 minutes, but what are beginners for?!

From the casting on stitches we were able to start using our other needle and start truly knitting. We learnt the 'normal' knitting stitch as our basic, I found this much easier than casting on. I had had a little knitting experience when visiting my Granny so sort of knew where I should put me needle - so that helped a lot, and Ashley got into the swing of it in no time too.

Knitting is more difficult than I originally thought - just a flick here twiddle there and hey presto you have a jumper.. Not so. There's a lot of thought and concentration needed for this craft. I suppose when your a master knitter you can swish and flick you needles at the speed of light, but as a beginner I could barely look up from my needles without something horrible going wrong. 

I've found this knitting group so much fun so far, even without the knitting - its really cool to get together with a group of friends laugh and have fun. All our chatting and gossiping really defined the term 'Stitch and Bitch' for me! We were knitting and talking and laughing for about an hour and a half when Nicola and Kate had to leave... leaving us teacher-less - but we had gotten to this point (below) and thought we could manage to keep going

- and the next time we looked at a clock another hour had passed!!

Decisions Decisions

When I first found out I had to learn a new occupation for my PO2 class, hundreds of ideas filled my head - all of the things I had daydreamed about learning and doing were immediately running through my mind: learning French, travel ideas, learning to play guitar, or creating something crafty -  to name a few. I started researching a few of these ideas and wondering which one would be best, I really wanted to learn French. I have been to France - Paris and Cannes, and though I would attempt to  bring out the fluent sophisticated Parisian inside of me. That plan was foiled however by the Clubs and Societies timetabling - Their French course ran to suit the University, not the Polytech and so I was on placement or on holiday when the class was running. So sadly I had to give up on that idea, the  Parisian inside of me will have to wait to get her moment... 'Toutes en bon temps'. :)

After a few more of my ideas fell though I sat back and tried to think in a different tack, I had been hoping to do something in a teacher/student like atmosphere like taking a class - but then I though I could have anyone teach me anything, anywhere, as long as I didn't need an 'actual' teacher. It was around the time I had  this great idea that  my very crafty friend Nicola popped by. We talking about a hot water bottle she had just knitted from scratch, and by the end of the conversation Nicola had become my new Knitting teacher!! We scheduled to meet once a week, and hopefully the result of our 9 weeks is for me to have made a hot water bottle cover myself!

When Nicola had left I had a great feeling of excitement and enthusiasm about how the 9 weeks were going to pan out. I started looking up knitting online and emailed my Granny who is an avid knitter telling her that I was about to join the fold - so to speak :)

Nicola's flatmate Kate is going to learn too, and I persuaded another OT friend Ashley to join us as well, so now we are a true knitting club. 

All I have to do now is to find some wool and knitting needles and I'll be ready to go. :D