A little background

Hi! Well, I thought it would be fun to make a blog to keep track of my multitude of needle projects. When I was maybe 10 years old, my mom taught me how to cross-stitch. Until recently, this had been the extent of my needle prowess. I've been cross-stitching forever and am pretty good at it (if I do say so myself), but I was finding that the time and energy you put into a project was getting tiresome. I think it was the one cross-stitch that I worked on ad nauseum for two years that was the final straw. So, I decided it was time to branch out. I've always been interested in knitting and have had a couple people try to teach me along the way. Sadly, I'd never had the attention span to bother actually figuring it out, so any knitting I'd done was always just barely started, terrible, and thrown in a pile somewhere until I had forgotten any semblance of knowledge I had.
A couple years ago now at Christmas a friend of mine got a couple knitting needles out and, to my amazement, I found that I still remembered some basic knitting skills... actually, I remembered how to knit, but not purl. But that's a start. At this point I no longer had any knitting teachers, so I youtube-d my way back into knitting.
Then the same friend decided she was better at crocheting, so I figured we'd do a skill swap. I'd teach her to knit and she'd teach me to crochet. So, I'm bumbling through learning the basics of crochet at the moment.
I now have a multitude of projects on the go and I thought it would be fun to track them via a blog. I don't have any pictures of what I'm working on right now (yet), so I'll leave you with a couple pics of my favourite pieces to date.
This is the last cross-stitch that I completed. I have a couple others on the go, but this one took FOREVER and I'm currently taking a cross-stitch break.
My most beautiful and most daunting knitted piece to date. I love the colour! I love the pattern. (I need to get someone to model it for a picture because it doesn't look all that exciting laid out flat). The pattern for this cardigan came from Bronwyn Lowenthal's Love to Knit book. I have found the book to have really cute, trendy patterns that are relatively easy to make.