Note To Self:

Things I Need To Work On:

1. Knit faster. (This is the primary goal.)
2. Cable. (I've had cable needles for ages now, but it's a skill I just haven't bothered with yet.)
3. Figure out another way to get the working needle back. (I tend to push it through the stitch with my left pointer finger, which leads to little red not-quite-puncture-wounds, and which I'm sure one day will leave me with a wicked callous.)
4. Make knit friends. Can be in person, internet, or mail pals. (I want readership! I want to be on blogrolls! And other blogs are always bragging about their recent packages from other knitting friends...I want to exchange neat yarns and markers and other nifties with knit friends too! If I can't find any, I'm going to have to determine who is my most pliable friend and force him/her into a knitting obsession.)
5. Not be stupid. (Seriously, the Jaywalker pattern is NOT hard. There's no reason I should have to frog back two needles in a row because I increased instead of decreasing. Nor should I look back a few needles and see that I forgot to pass the slipped stitches over. Knitting 101. This skill goal could also be designated as "Pay attention, dummy.")
6. Ego. (I waste a lot of time admiring my work. I can't tell you how much time I've spent stretching out my four inches of Jaywalker and just gazing at it. I've always been easily impressed.)
7. Stay up to date on knitting goings-on. (You know, Knit-Alongs, Secret Pals, all that stuff. That seems like fun.)
8. Counting. (Especially when casting on. Someday I'm going to have to cast on several hundred stitches and I'll go insane.)

Things I'm Improving On:

1. Knitting faster. (Alright...)
2. Picking up dropped stitches. (Because I've had plenty of practice.)
3. Gussets. (My gusset join-holes aren't gone, but they're getting smaller.)
4. Managing all these damned needles at once. (Whee. DPNs are fun.)
5. Multi-tasking. (I can knit while having a conversation - which probably seems rude and I don't make as much eye contact as I should - as well as while mostly-watching television or a movie. My proudest so far, though, is all the progress on Ken's sock that I made while at the King Tut exhibit - turns out I can examine artifacts, maneuver large crowds, and read history snippets while idly knitting stockinette. And I didn't accidentally stab anybody, not ONCE. Though I did almost knock someone down with my purse while I was trying to tug more yarn out of there...)
6. Gauge. (I don't swatch socks - what are socks but giant swatches? - but I'm getting pretty good at figuring out quickly whether something's gonna go or not.)
7. Yarn Acquisition. (I'm going to call it a gift, my ability to exponentially increase the number of skeins of yarn I have in my possession. And the harder to find/rarer the better. I want to find a skein of sock yarn hand dyed by a llama herder in Borneo using plant dyes obtained from indigenous trees and plied with the help of a herd of native tree frogs.)
8. Casting on. (Not the counting part, obviously - but I assess almost exactly how much yarn I need for a long-tail cast-on. I do, however, need to work on my other cast-on methods. That one is by far my favourite, and it's not good for everything.