Okay, so when I said it was going to take years and years to make our Bee Keeper’s quilt, I didn’t think I was talking about just the first honeycomb!

This is turning out to be a little trickier than I thought. Things that are new for me:

1. Double pointed needles (I keep stabbing myself!)
2. Tiny needles (my fat fingers aren’t nimble enough!)
3. Knitting in the round (there’s a whole extra needle just flopping around and getting in my way!)
4. Knitting with fuzzy wool, rather than cotton (it’s so hard to see what’s going on!)
5. Increases and decreases (actually, these aren’t too bad)

It has been a lot more frustrating than I expected. I lost count of the number of times I would spend hours on a honeycomb only to have to take it all out and start over. I am surprised at how much more delicate and difficult the tiny needles make everything. And of course, since it takes so much of my concentration to do it right, I knit everything waaay too tight.

However, my hard work was not for naught, because here is my beautiful, perfect, first honeycomb:

Although it took me several weeks, it turned out really good and I think it is better than Sara’s first honeycomb was, if I do say so myself. That doesn’t matter much, however, because she’s knit a few since then. You might say she’s kind of winning, if you keep track of things like that.

In fact, if we’re being honest, Sara, having already secured her lead in the honeycomb race, left to go knit a sweater.

Yeah, okay. But still, even through knitting this one honeycomb, I’ve already gotten noticeably better as I get practice. The first 10 rows took 100 times longer than the entire rest of it. So I’m sure I’ll be an old pro by the time I knit 50 or so more. That’s the nice thing about knitting: you improve so quickly, that you really get that positive feedback, like “Hey, I did it! I can see that I’m improving!”, which is encouraging. It’s a lot better than something like playing accordion, where you have to practice and practice and practice and even then you can’t really tell if you’ve improved or not.

I definitely think I am going to enjoy having a “go to” project. I don’t like to have down time, so it’s nice to know that I have something I can fall back on whenever I need something to do. Even if Sara is a little disappointed with my progress so far. However, this project is a marathon, not a sprint, and I don’t give up easily.

Onward and upward!