On Difficulty..
I just have to say, I love knitting in public where there are people of the older generations... There is always such a diversity of views on how difficult knitting should be for the average person. The people around my mother's age either point out how impossible that must be, and how brave I am, those around my grandmother's age smile and remember learning to knit when they were children and then promptly forgetting again, and they all have stories about their grandmothers or mothers who knit for the family.
As someone who is totally self taught I always find it interesting when people say that I'm doing the impossible. The truth is, I decided I wanted to learn and so I sat down in my car on my lunch break one day with some chunky rainbow yarn, a set of size 11 needles, and a really cheesy book on "Learn to Knit, the easy way'" that I picked out of the learn to knit book section at my local Joann Fabric store the day before. So I sat in my car and fumbled around for a while trying to figure out how to get more then one stitch on that needle and ended up with a row of 20 stitches and about 2 inches of really unsteady garter stitch. The next thing I did was rip it all back. I wasn't too afraid of losing what I'd done because hey, I didn't really know what I was doing yet, so why should I be afraid!?
So as I've never found it really difficult to knit... I've been challenged by a pattern, but I was never told that it was praticularly a hard thing to do, so I just threw myself at things (including the much abused sock) and just followed the directions. So every time someone comes up to me and says "oh wow, that must be really hard!!" I have a tendency to whip out the garter stitch blanket squares that I almost always have in my bag and shoot back "If you have 5 minutes, I can teach you!"
No pictures today! I've been too busy knitting to take pictures!!