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!!