magical mystery tour

Tonight, I made an advancement in my knitting life.

See, I learned to knit when I was 8 years old. Mom taught me. I played around a lot, never really got super into it, but always considered myself a knitter. In college, a friend organized a club to knit hats to donate to homeless shelters. A bunch of my hallmates were going to participate and learn to knit, and my latent knitting self came forth. But there was no real advancement in my knitting.

Until about 6 years ago. I went to Stitches East for the first time–my friend Osprey, who’s actually some kind of third cousin by marriage, had introduced me to the annual event. And that first year, I took a class. Double knitting. I’ve wowed people with that skill ever since. But that’s not the breakthrough (double knitting is so easy). No, the breakthrough was that while in that class, I saw a woman knitting continental for the first time. I’d heard of the technique, but never seen it in action.

So for the next few months I started to teach myself to knit continental. It was definitely a struggle. It was unnatural. My tension was wonky. But I persevered. This was a major advancement. I got freakishly fast (and I’d been speedy before).

And until recently, I’d not been making many advancements. Sure, I’d done a whole fair isle project, with great success, but that was clearly within reason for me.

Tonight, dear readers, I did the magic loop for the first time.

It’s very nice. I’m still getting the swing of moving the cord around, and I haven’t hit on a nice fluid sequence. But I like it. I’d been reading about it for a long time now, and I was just waiting for an opportunity to try it. The USMP sleeve is just such an occasion. (I’m trying out Eunny‘s 82 stitches instead of 92, but I’m considering starting over with 92, just to see how ridiculously big the sleeves feel.)

Another technical breakthrough for me–learned from knittinghelp.com–is the felted join when starting a new ball of the same yarn. Holy crap. How did I not think of this? Why did no one sit me down and tell me about it? My mom clearly doesn’t know about it, but needs to. It is far more magical than magic loop. I think it should be called Magic Join. After I did the first one, my boyfriend teased, “Are you going to go blog about it right now? Are you? Are you?” and I didn’t post about it mostly because I didn’t want to suffer further teasing from him. But I wanted to. Oh, I wanted to so badly. Because this has changed. my life. forever.