Helen FieldsScience Writer

Yaaaarrrrnnnn!!!!

It may just look like a pile of yarn, but…it’s my first sweater! I’ve been wanting to make a sweater, just because, I don’t know, when you learn how to knit, it seems like you should make a sweater. I knew I wanted to make a cardigan, because I never wear the regular kind of sweater, and it would be stupid to make a sweater and not wear it.

So I did what I always do these days when I’m looking for a knitting pattern: poke around Ravelry, possibly the coolest website of all time. People say it’s like Facebook for knitters, but it’s so much more. You can list your projects in there – for each one you can put in the size of needles you used, and the yarn, and record how long it took you, and whether the yarn was stupid. Then when you look at a pattern, the database is all linked up. You can see all the projects that other people have done and what yarns they used and look at their pictures.

I looked at a lot of patterns on Ravelry and settled on the “Cardigan for Arwen.” It’s super pretty, it’s got cables (yay), there’s no pesky zipper, and it’s named after a character in the Lord of the Rings. The only drawback was that the pattern costs $5.95, but considering I spent 50 bucks on the yarn, it seems a bit stingy not to want to pay the person who’s going to tell me how to arrange that yarn with sticks.

And now I have the yarn! Yay!