Practice ! Practice ! Practice !

Hey guys, so to keep you to date with things, I have bought my knitting supplies. (I will have pictures of it up in my next post as I can't find my camera atm )

So after I reading one much internet knitting guidelines..and watching a couple lots of internet knitting videos... and then applying what I've learnt so far.. I have come to one conclusion.

          I 

                     am 

                                    definitely 

                                                             a

                                                                        Natural

                                                                                              Disaster !

Why didn't anyone tell me knitting was so hard? lol. Or it could be just me, I might just be really bad at it. Yeah, I think it's the latter, haha. BUT! Yes there's a but! I'm not giving up ! Where there's a will, there's a way!

Currently, I'm just practicing looping the threads with my needles and getting used to it. I read that knitting is practically like a routine. I'ts basically just one sequence after another. I think once, you get the hang of it, It'll be a breeze after. So I hope. :]

So guys, the keywords of the day is "Practice, practice, practice". Remember practice makes perfect ! 

I'll see you guys soon, hopefully I'll have made some positive progress by then. :)

Diane 

                              

Oh No!

Hey guys,

I'M STUCK!! Being the usual over-excited and proud uni student (who think we know anything and everything), I rushed off bravely with my needles and yarn, carefully reading and analysing skimming over the "how to knit" guides. The result? DISASTER :(

The slipknot is step 1 in the basic knitting guide. Here's my Knitting Guide. Why did I choose this guide? Because it had PICTURES! So there I was, confidently making the slipknot. It was easy peasy, even for a beginner like me. So now I was pumped, I had officially started my first knitting project. Step 2....oh how it went wrong from here...

As I said before, after skimming the images (yeah, I didn't read the instructions), I pulled the yarn over my needle, grabbed the other end and pulled it under and ...I did that a couple of times. I compared my "scarf" to the pictures... and WOW did it look different.

SO I undid the rubbish I made, and am now currently actually READING through the guide properly. Actually I may infact read through many guides, and be 100% sure I won't stuff up next time.

The moral of my story?! READ THE INSTRUCTIONS!!! So you don't have to do what I did ><
Maybe I should have watched Andrews Video.

Hopefully I would have finished started my scarf by the time you read my next post.
Have a good one! I'm sure I will :D

-David-

Knitting 101 by Rina

So, I did a bit of reading on knitting. And here's the basic steps:

1. Think about a what you want to make.

We can knit many things - scarf, tablecloth, sweaters, dresses, gloves. I've decided to make a scarf, because apparently, it's the easiest simplest thing to make - perfect for newbies. Apparently, my teammates seem to have adopted the same idea.

2. Look for the pattern in books.

Yes. Obviously, we can make patterns when we knit. I knew that. You could get the books from any knitting store or online. If you're in Sydney City, I highly recomment visiting Lincraft. They have a wide variety of choices of books, yarn, and knitting needles. Or you could visit their online store. Unfortunately, the books are pretty difficult to comprehend (so might need an experienced friend). They look something like this for a shirt:

3. Get materials - knitting needles and yarn.

Choose your colour of the yarn, and get the right sized knitting needle (the diameter is different). Prices for knitting needles range from about $3.00 to $9.00 depending on the size of the knitting needle. Prices of yarn also differs depending on the type and quality of the yarn. Usually, you'll need more than one ball of yarn, so they do sell it in a pack. Make sure to check that you've got the right colour (and try to get them from the same production batch), if you bought them separately.

4. And you're ready to start!

Yeah. I'm ready as well. You could even ask for help from more experienced people (like my mom), by joining clubs. If you go to those knitting shops, sometimes there'll be people sitting down there, knitting. You could talk to them and get them to teach you (and a great way to make new friends!). One place I recommend is Morris and Sons on York Street. Or, you could just post your questions on some knitting forum (Viva technology!!).

Right. Now you absolutely have no excuse to not start knitting. It's not a too expensive hobby - it only costs about $30 to start up. And the benefits are awesome - new friends, you get to use what you make, and a new hobby! So start now! You could pick up your supplies at the places I've mentioned, or just look around Sydney - you're bound to come across a couple of similar stores.

Time to start!?!

Hi everyone, I'm Andrew 4th member of our GREAT knitting group. I've never knitted before but can't wait till give it a go, knitting with friends, I'm sure it'll be fun!

So, because I don't want to embarrass myself I've been reading some guides on how to get started knitting and how to knit - Google is such a smart friend <3. There's lots of tutorials on youtube as well, so if you don't already know how to knit, you have no excuse not to give it a go, even if you don't have a group of smart uni students ready to help you when you need it :P

I have this idea that group knitting sessions where we knit together sounds fun, we can help each other and give advice, perhaps show some new techniques we learned that others don't know about. It just seems that if knitting becomes second nature then we can multitask.

Spread the word ~ make your own knitting groups, but we are the original!

-Andrew

Third post ! :)

Hi, my name's Diane ! This will be my first ever blog post as well !

So, the hobby we have decided on is knitting. I think this is quiet a challenge because I have never knitted in my life.  But you know what? I think its about time I give knitting a go :) Find out what's so special about knitting that I hear everyone going on about ! Who knows? I might just as well be a natural ! :P

To kick off this activity, I've been looking at different types of design and colours for the scarf I plan to make. I was thinking of a a mix of dark and cool colours to suit our autumn weather here in Australia. Something similar to this picture I found on the net.

Black, grey and brown are just about the right colours for Autumn I think ! Now off to go buy supplies ! :)

- Diane Abinoja - 

Our Second Post! Finally!

This is officially my first blog post in my life! haha I'd thought it'd be more exciting, but fair enough. I can MAKE it exciting. 

Well, my name's David, and knitting isn't my thing. So we (as a group) decided to try it anyway...

Today I went shopping. Yes. Shopping. Shopping at spotlight for all my knitting goodies. Like the NEEDLES and YARN. and I'm fairly excited about doing something NEW. ..(oh and on a side note, I just realised I write words in CAPITALS when i try to emphasise something.. lol thats random).. but anyway.

The colours I chose were RED and a Yarn with WHITE, BLACK and GREY, all mixed together. The reasons I chose these colours was.... NOTHING. It was random. i went into the store and these were the first two i picked up... Hopefully they look like awesome scarves, after I'm done making them. 

That's all from me tonight. Hopefully I will have started this daunting task by next week. 

-David Han-

Our first post! Finally!

Yay! We've finally kicked off our ISYS100 Assignment 2 blog (this one) after a lot of discussion. Since this is the first post, I'll be talking about what we plan to do with this blog.

Basically, we will bee researching a hobby (just one!) - knitting!! Sounds boring, right? But it's really quite difficult to do. The four of us, Andrew, David, Diane and I (Rina), have decided to try out knitting and will be posting/blogging about our experience and opinions as we progress along.
So, in every post, we'll show you what we did and what we think about knitting. Sounds simple, right? Or not. So, keep checking our blog or add us on our twitter account (awesumfoursum) to get tweets on our blog updates!

Each post will be accompanied by a picture of our progress in knitting, or what we did. Overall, we want to use this blog to look something like a research journal (if you know what I mean), where we take up a project (knitting), and then write our opinions on it.

If you need some kind of visual aid of our storyboard, and what we plan to do with it in the future, here's a picture for you:

And that's basically it! If you didn't understand what I just explained, please pardon me, since I'm still a beginner at blogging (Yes. Can you tell I'm not tech-savvy and have limited vocabulary?). But don't give up on this blog just yet. I can almost guarantee that it'll be absolutely interesting - only one way to find out. That's if, you keep checking this blog! =)


-Rina Chiew-