On ancient artifacts

Approximately 77 years ago, or possibly on September 1, 2010, I started knitting a Deep V Argyle Vest. I had every intention of finishing this vest on or about November 30, 2010.

Needless to say, that didn't happen.

Otherwise I wouldn't be writing this post, would I?

No, other life events cropped up, other more pressing knitting, and the vest was pushed aside. It's spent the last . . . 16 months or so in this project bag:

But I still really want to own this vest.

For starters, I love Eunny's design.

And I adore the colors I picked for it.

And I like vests.

So I have every intention of finishing this vest.

Even if, today, it still looks like this:

And I'm not even certain exactly where I left off.

The vest pattern includes something that strikes fear in the heart of every knitter--steeking.

With that in mind, and having recovered from wasting my time with a steeking class at Rhinebeck last year, I signed up to take a class on steeking at Fibre Space this past Tuesday.

The class covered both handsewn steeks (useful on non-wool yarns) and crochet steeks. Crochet steeks were what I was most interested in, and worried about, given that most days, I can barely remember how to do a single crochet.

Way back in September 2010 when I was planning for my vest, I knit a swatch--in the round, with vertical stripes for the steek, for practice. And then left it sitting in the bag with the rest of the vest. This seemed like a good time to pull it out, so I brought it with me to class.

The instructor ooh'd and aah'd over my swatch and color choices, and that made me feel special. Yay!

But then, the hard part came.

Except.

It wasn't really that hard.

I did a somewhat sloppy single crochet along two separate columns of stitches, and then sliced the swatch open.

Easy peasy.

(The instructor didn't measure off enough yarn for one of the rows of crochet, so that top corner is unraveling, but since it's a swatch, no biggie. I'll be certain to measure off more than enough yarn when I do it for real.)

You can see the crochet is holding the yarn nice and tight, no reason to worry.

She even went over how to pick up stitches to do whatever finishing you're going to do--picking up stitches is a little awkward in the middle of the piece of fabric, so I appreciated a lesson on that.

I left the class feeling confident about steeking, while simultaneously hoping I'll still remember everything we did months (years?) from now, when I'm finally ready to steek my vest.

And now that I've steeked ONE WHOLE TIME, I'm thinking about putting together a little tutorial for the blog.

Because if I can do it, anyone can.