A New Obsession

Originally Published August 2, 2009:

I confess that I haven’t been doing much tarot lately, and that’s a shame, really. I haven’t even been buying decks, can you believe it? (Amazing, I know.)

No… I’ve been buying yarn… and crochet pattern books… and How-To knitting books. And did I mention yarn? Most of the time when I see yarn on sale (and it has to be a good sale), I’ll pick up a few skeins, because yarn can be expensive if you want to make anything more than a scarf. But several times now I’ve purchased yarn with a project in mind.

So, since I have all this yarn, I’ve been doing a lot of crocheting. And just recently I took a knitting class to learn how to make garments. I love to crochet because it was the craft my grandmother taught me, but afghans take so long to make. (Yes, I know there’s plenty more to crochet than just afghans, but I seem to gravitate toward these. Maybe that’s because that’s all that Grandma made. We do have many old afghans around the house.) And I want to make tops to actually wear, but knitted garments drape much better on the body than crochet does. Thus, the knitting class.

I took the class with just one other person and the instructor, which actually worked out very well. Talk about personal attention! It was great because I had already learned the basics through books and YouTube, but I never had anyone to tell me if I doing something wrong, or to help me when I had problems. So this class turned out to be just what I needed. From here on out, I feel I can do most things learning through books and practicing a LOT. That’s one thing I learned in that class; the only way to improve your skill is to knit, knit, and knit some more.

Anyway, let me get back on a tarot topic… with my crochet I wanted to make more than just the afghans I’ve been gifting, something smaller so that I could see my results fairly quickly. So, I designed my own tarot bag! :) Yay! This is the way to go! I know what I like, and this way I can make it the way I want it.

I’ll try to post a picture if I can figure out how, but you can also see it if you belong to Ravelry.com, the most awesome knitting/crocheting website I’ve found yet. It’s listed on Wikipedia as a social networking site, and it is, but I use it mostly for the database feature. You can keep track of your projects, yarn stashes, projects you want to do, needles and hooks, and your library, as well as all the other networking things, like friends, groups, discussion lists and the like. But you can also search patterns from books, magazines, designers, and anybody who has something to add.

Which is basically why I began this post. I want to post my tarot bag pattern, but it seems that I have to have it “published” somewhere, so what better place than here? So, I’ll stop here and create another post just for the pattern.