I know it's a scary thought, buuuut... My soon-to-be-6-year-old niece was with me when I stopped by the yarn store yesterday. While I was poking around the pretty cuddlies, she occasionally would pick up a ball and very gently hold it up so I could see the color. (She actually has a great eye for color!)

Well, she kept showing me this one skein of hand-painted mohair blend. It's like a fuchsia-pink-and-purple-ish. She is not only the most adorable kid in existence, she's also a con artist, and before I knew what was going on, she had talked me into buying the yarn. (And some kids' needles for her to learn on!)

Well... Now I have this yarn, and I have no idea what to use it for. She's a very gentle kid, so I'm not TOO worried about giving her something made with mohair. I just don't know what to make. So that's where you come in, my fellow craftsters. I need your help. I have lots of patterns sitting around that would be perfect for this yarn, but none of them would be good for a child. I feel like it would be too itchy for a sweater or a scarf, but I don't know that she would really use a shawl or anything... HELP?

(Sorry, I keep asking so many questions lately!) My brother wanted a scarf, so I picked up two balls of gorgeous, soft, 53% wool, 47% acrylic yarn and went to it in garter stitch. But the yarn was so beautiful that I wound up making the scarf wider than I'd previously thought, and as such, it's not as long as I would've liked. I'm going to go pick up two more balls of the yarn tomorrow, but my brother's talking about wanting to wear it tonight. Foolishly, like the noob knitter I am, I didn't think before binding off, so I'm just planning to snip the last stitch when I get the new yarn and frog a row to get live stitches.

Since he wants to wear it tonight, I was thinking about blocking it to stretch it out a bit. Is this a bad idea since I only have half of it finished, or can I safely block the rest of it without causing some bizarre disaster later on?

I'm making some simple 2x2 rib arm warmers, and I'm supposed to bind off 12 stitches for a thumb hole, then cast them back on a few rounds later. I figure I'll probably just cast them on over a larger needle, then slide them onto the needle they're sposta be on. But I don't know what bind-off to use. Is there a stretchy one that I can do in the middle of a piece?

I really want to knit a pair of socks, but the only yarn I have is samples from an old Phat Fiber box, and not enough of them to make two socks. So, I grabbed all my green, brown, and orangey rovings, batts, and anything else I could find, weighed it, and found that I had a little more than I would need to make enough sock yarn for a pair of snuggly socks.

This's where my problem starts. I read on some blogs that sock yarn should be spun at about a 15 degree twist. My yarn keeps falling apart. I always over-spin stuff, because I'm so paranoid that if I don't, it will fall apart. Should I just go with my instinct to spin tightly on this, since I'm probably going to have to ply it? How thin should I spin the singles for a two-ply sock? Or should I navajo ply it? Or not ply it at all? These aren't going to be socks that I wear out quickly. I'll probably just wear them when I'm laying in bed or something.

Also, on an opinion note, since my yarn is going to be made of a bunch of samples and such, do you guys think I should tear the batts in half so that both socks will have each color, or blend all of the colors into one giant crazy batt, or just wing it? This's actually my first time making yarn that I'll actually be USING for something. I'm so nervous!

A fellow knitter, much more experienced, told me that she knits continental style because it's faster. I've only been knitting about three months, but I've been knitting in the English method, wrapping the yarn with my right hand instead of scooping it with the needle from my left.

So a couple questions for those of you who are more knowledgeable than I:
 

• Is knitting Continental style faster than English?
• Is it difficult to learn Continental after you've already learned English, or vice versa?
• Does one method or the other tend to wear out your fingers faster?

So I'm going to be doing this church thing this Christmas called A Night in Bethlehem. It's basically going to be lots of different people doing historically accurate things from biblical Israel. I volunteered to be a woman spinning, because I'm a geek like that. I'm going to be preparing my natural brown and white merino to spin, I'm making a spindle to match the types they used at the time, but while doing my research I came across something pretty awesome.

It's a bowl that they use to keep yarns separate while they're plying, or just to hold onto their fiber. The book I found it in called it a spinning bowl, and I found a copy of it on Wikipedia. It's basically got this McDonald's symbol 3D on the bottom so it's like two arches.



Anyone know where I could get one of those? I've checked around etsy, but all I can find is supported spindle accessories. This spindle's more like a navajo spindle, and they don't actually touch the bowl. The bowl is kind of a distaff, I guess you could say.

I'm knitting my first sweater (yay!) and it says to knit the back in St st for 13 inches, then to bind off three stitches on each end and start decreases. My confusion comes in that it doesn't specify whether the last row before binding off those stitches should be a right or wrong side row. Does it matter?

I couldn't find a thread about this, and I definitely thought it deserved attention... For those not in the know (in case you couldn't tell from the title) November is National Sweater Knitting Month. I dunno if that's actually official or not, but I'm pretty sure the idea stemmed from NaNoWriMo, which is National Novel Writing Month. Basically, the idea is to write 50,000 words, one novel, in one month. Before midnight on November 30th. It's really fun, but I've failed miserably every time I've tried! (I never even got to 1000 words in some cases!) So naturally when I saw the concept of National Sweater Knitting Month taking place the same month, I was ecstatic. Since I'm a complete knitting noob, I don't expect to actually finish it in time, especially since I forgot it was this month and didn't get to start until a few hours ago!

But anyway, my question is - is anyone else going to give it a go?

This is my first real knitting project, though I knit a couple swatches of random stuff before, I've never actually knit something that was meant to be USED as anything. So here's one! A hat!



It's the Floopy hat, and I got the pattern here:  http://presentsknits.blogspot.com/2008/07/free-pattern-floopy-hat.html

I love it, but I'm going to make another one because the pencil roving didn't make the hat as floppy as I was hoping it would be. So this time I'm going to use the recommended yarn, and I have someone who's willing to buy the yarn for me, granted that I give them the finished project.

So there's that!

I'm knitting a hat on circulars, and it is supposed to decrease until it comes to a point, kind of like a santa hat. Well, the problem here is that my circular needles... don't decrease along with it. Should I take it off of the circs and put it on DPNs? Use the magic loop technique or something? Help!