You learn something every day

You'd think that with an activity as simple and as old as knitting that after a while you'd know all there is to know.

I always find it wonderfully refreshing when I read some of the knitblog alphas say they love looking at the blogs and seeing what everyone else is up to. I think to myself 'why do that, when people are looking at your blog for inspiration, aka, something to copy'. I'm not talking about stealing or copyright here, so easy tiger.

I'm talking about change, the organic way a craft develops over the years, a trick shared here, an idea shared there, all coming together to form a collective journey of technique advancement and improvement of the craft for the sake of itself alone.

For example; they didn't used to have circular needles. Therefore, any circular shawl or lace or whatever had to be limited by the number of stitches you could squeeze onto a set of dpn's. Otherwise it was just square knitting back and forth in various ways to grow a shawl.

With the invention of circular needles came the wondrous possibilities of circular shawls that were much bigger than doilies on dpn's. Later came the idea of socks on two circulars, and even socks on one circular.

Today, as I was flicking throught the endless magazine that is the craft interntet world, I came across a trick so fantastic I couldn't wait to try it. I had to share it with you.

Did you know that you can make hand-painted yarn stripe vertically up your scarf fairly easily. And how good does it look? (read the April tip)