Hello, my name is Yolande O' Brien and I can't draw... But I wanted to hang out with all my artistic friends at Pubscrawl so I bring my knitting along instead. Not a classic pub activity or even a social one, but it works well and it's encouraged me to be more inventive with my projects. While the artistry my friends engage in eludes me, I find knitting more like engineering with wool. I don't need to be artistic, just to understand the maths and mechanics of it.
I learned to knit from my mother when I was eight and I asked for the Learn To Knit Kit for my birthday. I was a boring child. I didn't really do any throughout my teenage and college years, but I started again when I decided a knitted penis would make a wonderful present for a friend. This more or less coincided with knitting coming back into fashion. It's no longer a pastime for grannies but a thriving subculture where we knit weird things like Cthulhu or nerdy Christmas jumpers.
Thanks to Mary Fallon and Galway Crochet Craft, I added crochet to my repertoire last September. I'd been meaning to learn for a long time because whenever I had a new project for a toy in mind it was far easier to find a crochet pattern than a knitting one. The medium is far better suited to making toys than knitting is. It hadn't occurred to me at the time, but the variety of style and stitches in crochet meant I could branch out from toys and clothes and start much finer work in the form of Irish Crochet. It's very intricate and time consuming, but I enjoy the challenge in making something so ornate.
That's about it for me. If anyone out there enjoys wrestling with wool like I do you should come join us at Pubscrawl. The staff in McSwiggan's are used to us now so it's only a little weird.
No comments:
Post a Comment