3KCBWDAY6 - Improving your Skillset

As I don't tend to post at the weekends, I'm a couple of days behind on the last 2 Knit and Crochet Blog Week topics, so I'll post them both today instead ;)

6. 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.

During last year’s Knit and Crochet Blog Week, I think I’d been knitting for approximately 6 months… Which means I’m now at about 18 months.

Earlier this year I set out what I considered to be my crafting goals, skills that I wanted to acquire and/or improve. I’m really happy with what I’ve already achieved as a knitter, I tried cables, garments and socks all in a fairly short space of time. I found that if I assume something won’t be hard, it turns out that I’m usually right *laughs*

In fact, just to throw in a little self-promotion here, I wrote a series of posts on how some of the skills that some of us fear will be too hard, just aren’t: Socks are Hard and Colourwork. I strongly believe that if we tell ourselves it is easy, there’s no reason for it not to be. Having said that, I still haven’t braved steeking *laughs*

So, back to my goals. I wanted to try colourwork for the first time…

That went really well, I enjoyed the rhythm of it, and I love the finished article.

I wanted to learn to cable without a cable needle. I picked that up pretty quickly, thanks to the fact that the socks I am (still) making for cunning boyfriend are covered in 2 stitch cables. There’s no way I wanted to wrestle with a tiny cable needle on top of 4 DPNs! Now that I’ve learned, I haven’t picked up a cable needle since.

My other goals weren’t skill based as such (unless you consider using stashed yarn instead of buying new to be a skill – it’s certainly a challenge!) so I think it’s time for me to consider what I want to achieve next… The 2 main things are:

Better finishing. I’m not great at seaming, I rush it because I want to finish the item. But I know that taking the extra time to do it well will pay dividends in the long run, by giving me a better garment. So I need to be more patient and work harder at finishing (although I tend to avoid patterns with seaming in general!)

Deciding whether or not I want to knit lace. I aspire to knit wonderful lace pieces and envy those who can do so (I’m a little impatient, if you hadn’t already noticed that, and lace needs a level of concentration I’m just not sure I can provide *rolls eyes at self*)… But, I don’t actually know if I would wear lace items, I think they’re beautiful, but maybe the fact that I’m not a lace knitter is not a slight on my skills, it’s just me knitting what I know I want to wear…