KnitPost: My love affair with needles and fibers (and knitting websites!)

If we are friends IRL, you probably know my favorite busy-hands activity is knitting.  I learned to knit from my mom about three and a half years ago, and since then I've become a tornado of knit-tivity!

Why do I love to knit?  Ever since I was a little girl, I've been fidgety.  (In case you haven't figured it out by now, my Twitter handle, @je_gigote, means "I fidget".)  I can't even tell you how many thousands of times my mom would hiss at me "Sit. Still!" I just can't do it! And now that I've learned to knit, I can do something with my restless hands and actually be productive.

I love the easy repetition of making stitches, but I also love the challenge of figuring out a new stitch, or how a garment is worked, or making modifications to a pattern to make it a perfect fit.  I love making little gifts for friends and family, and I love that every garment/piece is unique.

I love love love yarn shopping and pattern browsing!  All the beautiful colors, dyes, textures, and fibers of a yarn store are enough to make a color enthusiast like me fall over backwards with happiness.  (Seriously, if you're wondering what I'm on about, go to your local yarn store and just bask in the fiber-y goodness.)  I love looking at patterns and wondering how that would look on me or my mom or my sister or my friend and what yarn I'd use.

Right now I'm working on a super-easy slouchy hat for my mom, and I have a beautiful cardigan that I finished a few weeks ago that needs to be blocked and have buttons sewn on. I promise I'll post pictures of that, because it's a gorgeous, soft, warm garment that I absolutely adore.

If you're wondering what knitting websites feed my addiction, here's a few I love:
Ravelry (The ultimate social network for knitters. Love it.)
Knitty (Awesome knitting ezine. The patterns featured in each issue are super awesome.)
Knitted Bliss (A blog by amazing knitter/designer Julie Crawford, who is smart, beautiful, creative, and Canadian. Basically, I want to be her.)
KnitPicks (Online yarn store. Good quality yarn at excellently low prices. Plus, they sell a ton of books. I go to this site all the time and droll over yarn colorways.)

This is the first post.

A few months ago, I turned 29.  Not really a big deal in the course of my life, and certainly not a big deal to the rest of the world, but since then I've definitely taken a bit of an account of what I'd like more of in my life as I pedal my cruiser towards 30.  One of those things is writing again with some regularity, and I think a blog (that, hopefully, people are reading) will keep me accountable to that.

Most of you reading this probably already know me a little, so I'll spare you the boring details.  This blog will contain updates on everything from what I'm currently knitting to recipes I've tried to reviews of books I've read and movies I've seen to thoughts on current events, culture, theology, history, or stories of Things That Actually Happened to Me.

And you, Dear Reader, can help shape this blog if you'd like!  Feel free to suggest that you'd like to see or hear more (or less!) of something and I'll try my best to create updates accordingly.

As a First Post Push for Good Karma, here's a list of some awesome daily blogs which I love:
The Lady Pastor:  This is my awesome friend Emily's blog.  She is a pastor with an eye for design and an appreciation for the simple things that can so wonderfully enhance our lives.
Not a Crazy Vegan:  Rachel's hilarious food blog proves that she is not crazy in her attempts to be vegan.  I love her cooking tips and the vegan recipes she tries are absolutely mouth-watering!
Dooce.com:  Because it's Dooce.com.  I mean, have you ever cried whilst reading the interwebs?  Have you? Have you??
Hyde Park Cats:  The blog for the organization for which I foster.  They do amazing work and the pictures of the kittehs on the website are teeth-achingly adorable.

And you can follow me on Twitter as well; I'm @je_gigote (if you figure out what that means, you'll know how perfectly it describes me).

Let me hear from you and we'll party in the blogosphere til the break of dawn!  (Ha ha, inadvertent Twilight reference!) I'm a dork.