Knitting Class 1

Tonight was the first knitting class.  Ashley and I wondered whether we'd be the youngest people in the class since old ladies do knitting.  We wondered correctly.  We were *definitely* the youngest two in the room, however, most of the people were in the 50's and not their 90's as we feared.  Ashley and I also determined that we were going to be the class dunces that held everyone up because we didn't understand how to do anything.  We were partially correct.  We didn't understand how to do most of it, and had to wait for 1 on 1 help, but we weren't the slowest.  Yay!

Class started out with a brief meet and greet period, and then we learned how to "cast on."  This ended up being relatively easy, and Ashley and I mastered it in no time:

The we moved sloooowly on to learning how to do a knit stitch.  Our teacher, Dory, is from Germany and explained that there are two ways to knit: the American way and the European (or Continental) way.  Apparently back in the day it was extremely taboo to teach the European way in the United States.  I've decided that while I love all things American, we really messed up on our version of knitting.  I tried both ways and determined that not only is the American way 10X slower, but it's also much more complicated than it needs to be.  So, my knitting style of choice:  European.  I got the hang of it pretty quickly after Dory showed me each way to knit.

Ashley had a little more trouble with the actual knitting part.  I think it's because she's doing the American way.  There's too much stopping and starting and moving your hands off the needles.  Dory did a row of knitting for Ashley to show her how to move her hands.  Here are a couple shots of our knitting just before we left class.  

I'm pretty excited to keep practicing this week.  Next week, Dory is going to examine our knitting we practiced at home and show us how to fix the things we messed up.  I'll be really interested to see how to pick up dropped stitches because I'm fairly sure I dropped a few tonight :)