New (Or Old?) Hobby

About 13 years ago, I learnt how to knit during my mid-year school holidays. I bought some yarn and learnt it at the knitting shop. My first masterpiece was a blue blouse for myself. My second masterpiece was a wool vest for my dad. But after that time, I stopped knitting completely due to the lack of time.

It must have been about 5 years ago where I picked it up again. This time, a scarf for... I think it was some guy.... but my poor memory could not tell me whom I was meaning to knit it for... I only realised that I had an unfinished piece of work when I was searching for my pair of knitting needles recently and I found them attached to the unfinished scarf (since 5 years back!).

I regained my interest to knit. I realised that knitting is fun because I like seeing the every stitch I knit, slowly forming a piece of garment. Just with 2 basic stitches - knit and purl, so many designs can come out of it. There is great eagerness to begin with the yarn and needles. I try to ensure that each knit stitch is a knit stitch and a purl stitch turns out to be a purl stitch. If somewhere goes wrong, the mistake can be obvious. And as I knit, what keeps me going is the anticipation of the final product. Lots of joy and satisfaction also comes from myself (or the receiver) looking good in the finished product :)

I know there are not much of a knitting craze in Singapore. And besides we don't really wear knitted garments in this humid weather. And even if we do, they are machine made in the factories and not hand-knitted. A thought has crossed my mind that if only I don't need to work but just knit and knit and knit... :P but this is surely a hobby that will make me put on weight especially it involves much sitting down :P

There are not many places that one can buy yarn in Singapore. I first thought of Spotlight at Plaza Singapura. However most yarn on sale there are wool as most (if not all) are imported from Australia. It was only some time later than I found out a specialised shop in Chinatown that sells knitting yarn, threads and materials for other related hobbies. Shop name is Golden Dragon. There are more variety of yarn over there! But I realised that yarn is generally not cheap in Singapore. But I managed to find one which is of acrylic and nylon, double the weight (100g) of normal yarn, but at the price of a 50g type. I bought the pink yarn and began knitting a scarf for myself!

The completed product - lace scarf

It took me about 3-4 weeks to complete this 1.8m project. Some says it looks purple but I insist that its pink. Well I guess it surely looks more pink on the pinkish background :p Enough of pink! Now onto my next project - black vest for.... myself ;)

If you wish to learn how to knit, you may pick up the basics from stitchguide. I picked up some of the stitches from there too! There are many free knitting patterns available if you were to perform a google search. But I think the best site is Knitting Pattern Central. This interest made me started a blog on knitting... but I shall only share it when it is more established :)