Anyone can knit...yes, I am talking to you...

Behold the "Nifty Knitter"! I got a set of 4 of these for $7.50 (yes, under $10!) at Michael's before Christmas and they are completely AWESOME.

To fully understand the awesomeness, let me take you back a little over a year...(this is where I wish I could create that Wayne's World sound effect...bodooboop...we are going back...)

Sprout asks me to teach her to knit. Or crochet. I sort of (barely) know how to do both. But not well.

And surely not well enough to explain it to anyone. Much less an 8-year-old...and her 5-year-old brother who can not STAND for her to know anything he doesn't also know.

So I got a DVD and I tried very very very very hard to be patient.

And I tried very very very hard to be clear in my instruction...and not rip everything out of her hands and do it myself.

And she would do a row or two and be terribly proud and then everything would fall off the needles and the world would come crumbling down. And all I could do was tell her that that has been my exact knitting experience, too. Promising start...ending in calamity...and, best case, crooked embarrassing creations.

Enter the Nifty Knitter. All you have to do is loop the yarn around the little pegs and hook one row over the other. Practically impossible to drop a stitch. Seriously.

I was so inspired that I made an entire scarf (!) in under a week (!) for my dad for Christmas. With stripes. Straight ones. Unbelievable! I did some funky crocheting improvisation to get it off of the Nifty Knitter aparatus...but it was quite respectable!

Sprout made the partial scarf in the picture up there...practically on her own. It is almost twice that long now and very impressive. She worked very diligently on it for many days - defying any and all expectations for how long she could focus on a single repetitive task. Yay, Sprout!

Tater is working on this sweater. Or he has high hopes that I am going to turn this huge tube into a sweater. I looked up instructions to do so and they have lots of abbreviations that I completely don't understand...so we'll see how that goes.

Maybe he would like a big white sweater-y tube top. That's what all the 6-year-old boys are wearing these days, right?

But he has been doing it himself. He doesn't like the looping part, he wants me to do that. But he has become quite adept hooking one row over the other. And again - 6-year-old boy. Knitting. Cool, right?

It would be super easy to do a hat (instructions come with the loom-y things) and there are fairly easy directions for a dog sweater (which apparently I am not allowed to make as there is a strict no-clothing-on-the-dog policy around here.) There are directions online to do fancy things like ribbing and pearling and other knitting things that are beyond my comprehension and motivation level.

Anyway - if you like the idea of knitting something - but the actuality has always been way to scary, this could be the way to go.

Or maybe if you are super nice to me I'll make you a scarf!