Inspired by Heather making socks for the Dulaan Project, I decided to try my hand at some mittens today (having finally finished the third baby toque yesterday, hopefully now in the right size), with the intention of hopefully donating a pair or two of mittens for the kids in Mongolia (we'll see how things go once the baby arrives... though right now, knitting is my favorite activity as it's soothing and I can put my swollen feet up and do my kick counts). Now, I have never been good at reading patterns. All those people who say, "Once you know how to knit and purl, you're set!" are WRONG. I knew how to knit, I knew how to purl, but all the K2tog and SSK and M1R were confusing the hell out of me.

I started googling for some pictures or videos of stitches, and just got more and more frustrated when everything was contradictory and confusing and just not making any sense. I put out a plea for help on my chat board and someone directed me to KnittingHelp.com, where they have really good stitch demo videos on just about ANYTHING you will see in a pattern. The SSK video, like Heather's, still looked like what I was doing when I was doing K2tog, and the K2tog video looked nothing like what I was doing, so I decided to go back to basics and just watch the basic knit stitch video.

It is not at all what I was doing when I thought I was knitting.

Apparently my grandma uses a technique called "Combined Knitting", which means everything has to be done differently. Now I'm waffling between re-teaching myself how to knit (correctly, this time), and just figuring out how to adjust the other stitches. Dangit!