As craft goes, I identify as a crocheter. I can knit, but I didn't pick up knitting like I did crocheting. Maybe that was an issue of community for me. Crocheting was something we all did together in grad school, and I learned to knit and did my knitting alone. I like that I only have to keep track of one loop in crochet, as opposed to all those loops in knitting. I have a harder time finding and fixing mistakes in knitting. Most of my problems with knitting would be best tackled with one age-old thing: practice.

The #1 thing I need to practice: purling.

Because I do it wrong.

To purl, I switch needles so that I'm actually doing a left-handed knit stitch instead. It's okay for some things, but not for my most recent project lust, BrooklynTweed's Noro Scarf. I blame Kate and Jenn, who've both done amazing ones. The purling problem here is that it's a 1x1 ribbing, and if I have to switch hands that often, I might die. This seemed to me to be a good project to practice my knit-and-purl-without-switching-needles thing, but this morning, I did one knit stitch--ONE!--and got frustrated with the first purl and stopped. Clearly, I need to do purling practice in general. Or, I need to get on learning the crochet knit stitch. I have two lovely skeins of yarn that I dyed (my first two) that would look great in that pattern because of the blues they have in common, and damn it, that's what I want to make.

For anyone who's curious, these are the two colorways I want to do this scarf in: