Grafting and beyond

Those of you who have knit for a while, avert your eyes. I am about to tell the tale of a novice knitter, who bravely and foolishly tried grafting while far from the Internet, far from her book and far from all the printed instructions she took before leaving for camping. She also left behind her darning needle, and was left with a sock that needed the toe closed, and a crochet hook. I gave it my all. I was really close, except for having to try to reverse the knit purl to accommodate the crochet hook rather than a needle. Oh and then there was that part about what stitches to keep on the needle, and what stitches to drop. Right. It's ugly, its not even close, but the rest of what followed is amazing.

I knit a practise piece. I watched the video from Knitting helps.com on the Kitchener stitch several times,

and magic happened. Right there in front of my eyes, it became instantly obvious, I was very very close to doing it right.

Oh, I see now that my stitches are twisted, but that is a combined knitter thing, and I'll get that figured out too soon enough, but isn't this magic thing fine? So moving on toward the socks awaiting the grafted toe.

First, take out the bad, evil icky attempt. Put the stitches on small needles, because my lone pair of the right size needles is with the other sock. Sit down with proper darning needles, well a really biggie tapestry needle works too, and get to work. Knit, purl, purl, knit.And here I am. A reasonably well done grafted toe. There are a couple of real clunkers in there, but there are also some Mary Poppin stitches in there too (practically perfect in every way). Like all my knitting, the rest will come with practise. For only my second knitted sock pair ever done, I'm feeling pretty good.

I have to go now and figure out how to address the things I learned doing this set of socks.

A) Its critical to have more than one set of needles of all the smaller sizes.

B) Take your darning needle with you no matter where you go.

C) It would really help if someone out there in beer land came out with a softsider beer cooler that had small pouches on the inside so that all the accessories of a really great work bag could stay put. Or I need some small clear pouches to put all my bits in.

I'm fairly certain that a trip to the yarn store will take care of all but the beer cooler part, but I might have to go to 2 yarn stores, just to be sure.