Unsolicited advise from a novice knitter who really just makes it up as she goes along...

How did I turn this tangled mess...

Into this?

Via this...

See it turns out that learning maths in school really does help with the important things in life...

I am not very good at following instructions, recipes, directions, and as it turns out... knitting patterns, but somehow I usually manage to get there in the end!

I was getting a little bored with the repetitiveness of knitting my cardi (see recent post) and decided I needed to be knitting myself a super-cool laptop bag for my impending arrival (that being my new laptop which you will here more about later!) and have always wanted to try Picture knitting (Intarsia I think it's called). I decided I wanted to go for a bit of a pirate theme and had two different patterns, neither of which were really doing it for me, but I used them for the basis and with the help of my very useful Stitch N Bitch Journal decided to write my own pattern.

Check out the almost finished result which I also felted and with the cheating help of an old jumper turned into a pretty cool bag for a beginner. Hey it may look very unprofessional to some of you... and if anyone asks I was going for the rough homemade look! But I am pretty proud of it, I'm just going to give it another felting and add some zips, and then hope that my Laptop will actually fit into it when it arrives!

So here is some unsolicited knitting advice from a complete novice...

• Yes you can teach yourself to knit from a book.
• When I was teaching myself I just happened to buy this multicoloured yarn which turned out to be really good coz I could see where I was at with it as the colour would change with each row.
• Just get in there and experiment coz you can always undo it!
• Its easier working with medium sized, wooden needles.
• Those fancy yarns that are actually a couple of different things in together make it kind of tricky!
• If your gonna try some Picture Knitting, Knit a few rows of the main colour first so you get past that twisty up stage which is where I was getting all confused!
• I also found twisting the two colours together when changing colours helped keep it strong at the joins.
• If your doing stocking stitch and you cant remember if your up to a Knit or Purl row - if the 'tail' of your wool is at the pointy end then you Purl. if its down the blunt end then you Knit!
• Felting can help to disguise holes.
• You can also say you are a punk knitter and made the holes on purpose!

Don't forget... World Wide Knit in Public day is coming up in June!