My first slipper attempt

There's just something about these that remind me of a cartoon fish, opening its wide mouth to dispense some sort of sea-life wisdom to a small fry, or to reprimand him. Yup, I'm pretty sure I have Max Fleischer to blame for this one.

Once you put them on, however, they resemble slippers. Phew. This is from the Mary Jane pattern on Purl Bee. Once I got the hang of it, it was pretty fun. Before I got the hang of it, it was frustrating. My index fingers felt like they had been continually pushing buttons, except the buttons were metal and pointy. Working in the round on a very tight pattern will do that to you. But I just pushed on through, and I felt like a real trooper when things started resembling what I had seen in the pictures.

When I first started knitting, I was told that whenever you want to start a new pattern, don't worry about the overall pattern before you start, otherwise you may be too intimidated to even begin. Just take each row as it comes, looking things up in your knitting dictionary or asking an old pro, or searching for tutorials on YouTube along the way if you don't understand what you're supposed to do.

This seems to be very unlike sewing, where you better darn well read the entire pattern so you know why there are all these strange markings everywhere, and think twice before you do anything, and I mean anything, lest you screw up the rest of the process. If you have a mom to fix your mistakes (like I do, but only when we're in the same city at the time), you might be okay, but nevertheless, you have to know where you're going with sewing.

Couldn't we all just sit here and wax poetic on the comparisons we can draw from this lesson? "I'm just moving through life like a knitting pattern..." perhaps you're thinking. Or maybe, "My life has been carefully mapped out like a sewing pattern...I always kept these little dots marked along the way, knowing I would come back to them someday..."

Luckily, this blog was not intended to provide the saccharine for your morning tea. (But I'll go ahead and say "you're welcome" to any who could possibly make use of this analogy.) I just wanted to show you how stuff works out and you end up with some pretty cozy slippers to sit back and relax in. And I did it moving step by step, without reading too far ahead in the pattern! That's what my point was.

And now, off they go to the post office to help my about-to-turn-27 friend celebrate her life of easy living.