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A Beginner’s Guide to Knitting from the New York Times

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how and why to get started knittingWhen I worked at a newspaper, it was often said that news is what happens to your editor on the way to work.

If that’s true, there must be a knitting editor at the New York Times. They seem to cover the craft a lot, including in this general introduction to the craft: How to Start Knitting (and Learn to Love it).

The author, Allana Okun, notes that a lot of people start knitting but eventually stop because of frustration or boredom. She argues that’s because starting with a scarf, as most people are advised, is actually a bad idea because they are so long, repetitive and show mistakes easily.

Instead she encourages people to learn the basics and then knit a hat.

The article covers the basics of how to get started knitting and why a person might want to do so. It would be a good one to send to a friend you’re trying to encourage to knit, or to the person who wonders why you do it. They might just decide they want to try, too.

[Photo: Kyle Dorosa, via the New York Times.]

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Tips for Picking the Right Color Yarn for Your Project

I have never been all that picky about the colors I use in knitting projects. When choosing colors for projects to go in my books, I try to pick colors that go together in individual projects and also to use a variety of colors among the projects in the book, so while I love blue and green I make sure to throw in orange and yellow as well, for example.

When knitting projects for myself I’m usually using stash so whatever I have is good enough. Or if I do happen to be buying yarn for a project, it’s usually more about the texture or fiber content of the yarn first, then choosing a color I like, rather than having a color in mind then finding a yarn with that in its line.

Marie at Olive Knits was looking for the perfect green yarn to replace a store bought sweater, and she found that picking out exactly the right shade was trickier than she expected.

She wrote a blog post full of tips for finding the right yarn when you’re looking for a particular color.

I think the hardest part of this these days is that we tend to do so much online shopping for yarn, either because we don’t have a local yarn store, we can’t get what we want locally or we want to support independent makers who live elsewhere. And if you’ve ever received yarn that isn’t quite the color you were expecting you know what I’m talking about.

One of her tips, then, is to look at a color swatch for the yarn you’re thinking about buying on every monitor or device you have available because it probably will look different on different screens (and maybe different still in person, and under different lighting conditions, or if you use it in a project with other colors…).

Check out her post for more tips on finding the right color for your project.

[Photo: Olive Knits.]

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