Knit Two Together

So a porpoise and a wallaby walk into a bar...

Just kidding. They actually walk into a ball of yarn. Or thirty.

Allow me to introduce the concept of a knit-along. A group of people come together over a particular pattern (or a yarn or a concept) and make sacred vows in the bonds of skeinly sisterhood to see it through together. Your comrade knitters can help you along with tricky bits of the pattern and spur your industrious knitting habits to keep your WIP (work in progress) from becoming the only UFO (unfinished object) in the group.

One day while visiting a friend of mine (Ania65 for those of you who Ravel), she showed me a library book that she had recently borrowed, Knitting and Tea. These are topics that interest us. I set my teacup aside, dropped my knitting in my lap, and turned the cover.

“There aren’t many patterns in there that interest me,” she said as I turned the pages. “Just one really. But a fun book.”

“I like this one.”

“Yep, that’s the one.”

I must hang out with her because of her good taste.

What caught our eye was the Snug Hood Wrap, a wide scarf that contains a hood and pockets. How awesome is that?

“We should knit this together,” we said together.

And now we have a knit-along. We spent a long period of time fingering yarns and pouring over catalogs. Ania went with the very elegant KnitPicks Andean Silk in a colorway called Wallaby. I also ended my shopping at KnitPicks, though I went more cas, with City Tweed DK in the colorway Porpoise.

So a porpoise and a wallaby walk into a ball of yarn...

We have diligently swatched, and blocked our swatches, and measured twice to appease the knitting gods. I think everybody here knows how I feel about gauge swatching, how every knitter feels about gauge swatching* but I have no need to anger the PTB on this one. I’m toeing the line.
Today we met. We dutifully fingered and complimented each other’s yarn choice, pulled out our weapons of choice, and (drumroll please) cast on.

I’ve already frogged down to the starting line twice (oh good, this posted needed an amphibian representative) but I can confidentlyish say that I’m off and running now.

So a porpoise and a wallaby walk into a ball of yarn. What happens next? Stay tuned.

*All knitters know that gauge squares lie. I say that with confidence. Because of the millions upon millions of knitters in the world right now, if one were to stand up right here, right now and say, “I always swatch and my projects always come out the right size,” a flurry of sharp, metal, and bitter needles would be instantly launched at the audacious knitter in question. She would be smote dead by her more honest brethren and then there would be no knitters standing up making ridiculous and obviously erroneous claims. We don’t gauge swatch because it makes our projects come out the right size. We gauge swatch so that when a project doesn’t come out the right size we can wave our fists at the knitting gods and cry out, “But I swatched, damn you!” /rant