Saturday, April 28, 2012

Knitting & Crochet Blog Week Day 6

Day Six - Saturday 28th April, 2012

Improving Your Skillset
How far down the road to learning your craft do you believe yourself to be? Are you comfortable with what you know or are you always striving to learn new skills and add to your knowledge base? Take a look at a few knitting or crochet books and have a look at some of the skills mentioned in the patterns. Can you start your amigurumi pieces with a magic circle, have you ever tried double knitting, how's your intarsia? If you are feeling brave, make a list of some of the skills which you have not yet tried but would like to have a go at, and perhaps even set yourself a deadline of when you'd like to have tried them by.

I'm going to keep today's post a simple list (mostly so I can bookmark it and reference it for myself later):

Since crochet is my main focus, here's a list of skills I'd like to master. Some of which I've briefly tried but not enough that I don't have to reference a book to do them again or to the extent I'd actually design something using them.


  1. Tunisian
  2. Broomstick Lace
  3. Hairpin Lace
  4. Entrelac
  5. Learn new stitches
    1. This is probably the only thing I want to attach a date too. I really want to start swatching blocks to learn new stitches. Maybe learn at least 2 per month based on the amount of time I actually have to do it.
So my crochet list is fairly short because I am pretty confident in taking on any WELL WRITTEN crochet pattern. Usually there's not a crochet pattern that will intimidate me at all :)


And then here's my sundry list of things on the knitting side that I'd like to try. Keep in mind I'm a pretty novice knitter. I've done it for years and can figure things out in patterns but the extent of what I make isn't all that complicated.

  1. Successful colorwork in an item
  2. Master double pointed needles (this includes socks and hexi-puffs)
  3. Really sit down with my knitting books and absorb all the goodness in them
  4. The easiest way to put any of these in the list is that I'd love to work through "The Knitter's Life List"
For those of you familiar with the "Year of Projects" I think sections out of her will make up my list for the second round of "Year of Projects" :) Just to force myself to sit down and really improve my knitting skills!

Maybe I'll tag this post as a "Year of Projects" post so that I'll remember to snag the idea when the time comes!

2 comments:

  1. I guess I need to learn new stitches more than I thought because I'm not sure I even know what Entrelac is. ha ha :)

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  2. I didn't know there was a crochet form of entrelac...not that I can do the knitted version in the first place.

    I had a really hard time with DPNs when I first started using them. I found that if I was able to start my work on circulars, I could switch to DPNs later and I was fine. I eventually learned how to start on DPNs (and it wasn't nearly as hard as I was thinking it would be - the biggest problem I still have is not getting my stitches twisted). Now I'm learning things on two circulars :)

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