Funny How That Happens

So this lace tablecloth I'm working on starts with a crocheted ring. It's a chain, with double crochets in it. Then loops are pulled up through those DCs and put onto the dpns to be knit.

SO much easier than casting on a couple of stitches onto dpns and then trying to work with them until you increase enough to actually keep them on the needle, amiright?

Listen, when I was a brand-new knitter I made a lace tablecloth. I didn't know any better. Ha! No, seriously. It never occured to me that it would be difficult or complex. Nothing ever did. I had a book with a lace tablecloth in it, so why wouldn't I be able to knit it, right? I just started knitting and when I got to something I didn't know how to do, I just figured it out. This was before the days of the internet, you understand. So all my knitting instruction (after my mom had taught me knit and purl and my college roommate had taught me a couple of other things) came from magazines I bought, books I checked out of the library (and this was back before knitting was a hipster thing to do, so there weren't very many knitting books or magazines out there), or from just futzing about.

Some things were easy to figure out. Yarn Over? That's pretty self-explanatory. K2Tog? Knit two stitches at the same time? Sure. Knit through the back loop? Seems pretty straight forward. It was all just one stitch at a time. I really never thought that anything would be difficult to do.

Ah youth.

That lace tablecloth was the first thing I had ever knit on dpns or circular needles. I had never heard of such a thing as dpns. But, I approached it logically. If I wanted to put 6 stitches on 3 needles and work in a circle, it was pretty obvious how I had to cast on and get started. The problem was, I just couldn't manage crochet thread on dpns with only a few stitches, working in the round.

I don't remember with 100% accuracy, but I'm going to go out on a limb as say there was some swearing involved.

Anyway, I kept dropping these stitches or the needles would slide out of the stitches, or I couldn't manage a yarn over at the end of a dpn... I was very frustrated. I knew I could knit this tablecloth, but I was just having problems with that one part. So I improvised. I made a crochet ring. Then I drew loops up through the ring and put them on the dpn. It gave that beginning bit so much more stability and I was able to knit the rest of the cloth with no problem.

So, it's funny now when the pattern calls for a crochet ring to start.