I spent most of the day watching DVDs and T.V. and trying to learn how to knit socks — in particular baby socks.
I had purchased a learn to knit socks kit from the internet with 5 double-pointed #2 needles, yarn, and instructions. I had read through the instructions the other night and reread them this morning and I thought that the first part — the casting on, the cuff, and the ankle — sounded fairly straightforward and easy.
That is until I tried to do it.
Casting on is extremely easy, unless of course you have bad fibromyalgia and your hands don’t want to work. Of course, my first thought was that I only had to do Casting on once…silly me.
I ended up having to Cast on about 20 different times today. I was fine after the casting on, I thought, until I had to do the k2tog (knit 2 together), which was a new knitting “stitch” or whatever you want to call it, for me. At that point I was only working on 2 needles and I couldn’t figure out quite how to do the k2tog. I couldn’t find exactly in the instructions when to add in the other 3 needles either. Plus, I kept having counting issues so I tried and retried this several times.
Despite talking about being a good starting point for beginners, I kind of feel that you need to have an idea of what you’re doing already so you can follow the instructions.
I also tried looking up instructions in several other books I have and on the internet, which was thwarted for at least the length of The Pursuit of Happyness because my cable and thus internet were out.
At some point I decided that the only thing that made sense was to use a circular needle. It seemed like the only way to be able to join the two ends. So I Cast on again onto one of my #2 Addi Turbos. However after I got the first row on again, I came to the same problem of not knowing how actually to do the join — the circumference of the sock was just too small.
I consulted my copy of Socks Soar on Two Circular Needles by Cat Bordhi which comes highly recommended. However, I found the descriptions only a little less vague than the other instructions I have. However, there were illustrations in the book of the Casting On through the joining so my next confusion was how to go about stitching with two sets of circular needles — there were no illustrations and I thought the instructions were confusing. Maybe I was just fighting actually understanding.
It took me a while and some searching on the web, but I think I finally figured out how to use 2 circular #2 Addi Turbos to Cast on and then join and start knitting the cuff of the baby sock. Of course, it’s taken me all day to accomplish knitting a few rows of a cuff. I don’t think it’s supposed to take that long and I have a sharp pain in my back just below my right shoulder blade as a result. 
Oh, and I’m not entirely sure I’m doing it right.
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