The 5 Stages of Becoming a Continental Knitter

I've always known that knitting continental is way cooler than english style, but man is it hard to change!  It's like learning to knit all over again and that's really hard when you fancy yourself to be a pretty decent knitter who, when trying to knit continental, looks kind of like a retard who just learned to knit an hour ago.  I know I shouldn't worry about it, but it makes me nuts!  My friend Emily, however, is a crazy good and fast knitter and I'm all jealous of her.  She's knit continental since leaving the womb (seriously - only shortly thereafter.  try 3rd grade.)  and she'strying to help me make the leap, mostly by jabbing at me with a "so how's that continental coming?" comment when she notices that I'm not doing it (which is all the time!)  I think about it every time I'm knitting and I passed through the denial, anger, and excuses phases this weekend by telling myself that I don't need to knit faster - this is supposed to be fun, dammit!  and also I remind myself that it hurts my hands to knit that way (even though I know it hurt when I first learned to knit english too.)  So now I'm in the grief stage - i.e. Emily won't stop giving me grief!  haha!  Therefore I'm going to move toward acceptance and commit to this thing - she suggested that I do something with a long string of purling, as opposed to ribbing or something where I have to do a bunch of switching back and forth.  I'm not so bad at the knitting part - I do colorwork with both hands so I'm always picking the color on my left and throwing the color on the right.  It's the purling that gets me down and makes me look all stupid.  I've decided that I'm going to make a clapotis - something I never really had any desire to make, but it does have the "purl all stitch on odd rows" instruction which meets my criteria, and it requires something like 800 yards.  I've got two stashes of roughly that much yarn that I've yet to find a project for and it's been keeping me up at night - it's such a weirdo amount!  I'm going to use my yellow Magi linen and I think it'll be fantastic.  When I'm done with that baby, I'd better be a continental knitter!   I hope you're happy Emily!  

Ooh, and on a totally different note - I finished a dress this weekend that actually turned out great - and fits! 

 I love love love it!  I especially love the keyhole and the neckline:

 - oh hell, I love it all!  It has cool seams that run down the front then curve under the pockets - oh yes, it has pockets!  and they're lined!  It's Simplicity 2927.  There were a whole slew of Simplicity patterns that I wanted to grab so I wrote them down in my little purse notebook then stalked them until JoAnn's put them on sale for $1.99.  So  now I have a stack of 8 patterns, but I'm already thinking about making this one again!  Ok, gotta go ice some cupcakes (german chocolate!)