1. Have someone you know teach you a new skill
2. Use this skill to make a white elephant present for the class
My new skill & present:
For a new skill to learn I decided to ask my good friend, Anna, to teach me how to knit. My mom likes knitting so I already had the materials I needed and just needed to learn how to actually do it. Anna began by demonstrating herself how to start a scarf and how to start transferring over stitches to create a row. At first my hands felt really clumsy and I felt awkward trying to move the needles, yarn and stitch all at the same time. After about 20 minutes I felt fairly comfortable doing it on my own and Anna didn't need to watch next to me anymore. I knitted for hours the first night and felt like I wasn't making hardly any progress. That's when I realized we probably started off with way too many stitches in the first row for a beginner scarf. I decided to end the piece early and sew the two ends together to create an infinity scarf, but realized the end stitches were about one third longer than the beginning. It looked okay, but I wanted to make something better for the gift giving.
My next project was a lot easier to manage. I started to make a winter ear warmer and had it finished in about 4 hours over two days. It looked a lot nicer than the first attempt. I liked the idea of an ear warmer because they're kind of goofy looking so it worked with the white elephant, but they're also very practical at this time of year. At the actual gift giving a boy received my teal ear warmer and I received a nice crochet hat.
I really liked doing this project because I get excited when I get to give people gifts, especially ones I have spent time making. I do agree that as an artist I have some sense of responsibility to share my skills and talent with everyone by either producing art for others to see, have, or learn to do themselves. I think this was a perfect way to end the quarter with everyone. It was really impressive what people ended up making.
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