Hooray knitting?

I am trying to teach myself to knit. What finally convinced me? Good patterns, mostly, and also the fact that knitting uses so much less yarn than crochet. The savings on yarn alone should totally offset all the money I'll have to put in my swear jar while I teach myself. It's just economical.

And, since wrangling the dog (he wants to eat my yarn, my knitting needles, my sofa, and everything else) and constantly pausing and rewinding the YouTube tutorials isn't distraction enough, I thought maybe I'd live-blog the process.

Step one: Make a slip knot. Slide the slipknot onto your needle and tighten it. Okay, yes. YES, I can do this. Knitting is easy! I will conquer the fiber arts! I will knit ALL THE THINGS.

Step two: Grow a third hand. Uh oh.

Step three: Using all three hands, the yarn, and the needle, make a complicated cat's cradle and stick the needle through it. Rinse, repeat. Um, what? What is happening? How did you make the yarn do that?

Step four: watch the same twenty seconds of YouTube video sixteen times, pausing every four seconds. There is something on your needle now. Regard it skeptically. Quizzically, even. Rinse, repeat.

Step five: realize that all this time, you've been doing...whatever it is you've been doing, which probably isn't knitting--with the tail of the yarn. Not the part attached to the ball of yarn.

Step six: realize how conveniently, temptingly pointy a knitting needle is. Try not to think about stabbing something.

Step seven: introduce the second needle to the first needle, your three hands, and whatever it is you've got going on needle one. Yes, that's right, the second needle. You'd forgotten about that. Because crochet has left you spoiled.

Step eight: realize that you need to use a pointy stick to pull a loop of yarn through a different loop of yarn. Sweet fancy Moses, isn't that what they invented crochet hooks for?

Step nine: repeat step six. Except that nothing is actually accumulating on your needle now. You seem to be making negative stitches.

I'm not giving up yet, but I think it may be time to make another pot of coffee and read another romance novel.

And maybe crochet something.