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I finally finished the knitting for the Great Steeking Experiment of 2011 (please, somebody, remind me why I thought it was a good idea to design something that required you to CUT your KNITTING?). DH came home bearing chocolate, and I sat down to steek.

You cannot understand the fear of putting scissors to knitting until you’re actually there doing it. Did I catch everything with the crochet hook? Is two solid days of knitting going to just fall apart into tiny scraps of yarn like broken dreams in my lap? What am I doing, anyway? This is a perfectly good coffee cup cozy as it is! I don’t need to steek this!

But I did. If I have any hope of knitting the cowl that’s sitting in my head waiting to get out, then I need to learn how to steek – and if I can’t bring myself to cut a little tiny piece of knitting, then there’s no way I can actually steek the cowl. So I sat down and turned this:

into this:

and finally, into this:

And it worked. I still ate the chocolate (it was seriously upsetting! Most people steeking for the first time do so with a stiff drink in hand, which just seems silly, because hello? mixing alcohol and CUTTING your KNITTING? that’s asking for trouble.), but it’s done! It didn’t fall apart (much. There were a couple of places where I had to do emergency repair work)!

And now I need to figure out what to do with it, since coffee cozies are so not my thing, and it’s honestly kind of ugly. I maaaaaybe could have chosen better colors for the sample.

The next step is to make sure I can steek singles. I’m going to have an interesting winter, but at least I won’t feel too bad if that crappy mini-mochi in my stash falls apart – it manages to do that without any help from me.

Finally, Dear Spellcheck:

Steeking is a word.

That is all.