I have a few skills I’d say I’ve mastered.  Knitting is one of them.  I’m no Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, but who is?  There’s a difference between a knitting master and a jedi-knit-knight.  I’m a master because there isn’t much that intimidates me.  Sure, I have to remind myself how to read lace charts, and I refuse to deal with 80 bobbins of yarn to create intarsia, and I’m always watching videos of different cast on techniques, but the things I don’t know how to do are just things I’ll try someday and when I do I’ll turn out a passable product.  I know how to fix mistakes, I know when to just turn a knitted item back to a ball of yarn.  I can throw and pick and strand and design.  I know how to knit.  It really doesn’t surprise me anymore.

Well, today a miracle happened.  One of my favorite blogs is SouleMama.  I feel like SouleMama is bizarro me.  She has five kids, homeschools them and lives on a farm.  I have one kid who has been in “school” since 13 weeks and I live in a city.  Her life intrigues me, because I can see myself in it.  If somehow we had been switched at birth I can imagine living in a homestead filled with children all wearing the clothes I made them with my own hands tending our flock of sheep.  (I’d homeschool them so that their friends wouldn’t laugh at my inept seamstress skills.)

On Monday Amanda, the author of SouleMama, posted about their family activities during the rainy weekend, and she included a picture of this crazy knitting project with yarn on double pointed needles and fluff hanging out of it.  No explanation, just a pictures, but I was intrigued.  I commented on her post guessing that she was creating roving lined mittens.  Well today her post was all about the thrummed mittens she’d created.  I took a deep breath.  In thirteen years of knitting I have never heard of thrumming.  This was something new.  I tore through her post.  I started searching Ravelry and Etsy.  Thrumming is a thing.  It is an amazing technique where every few stitches instead of stitching your yarn you knit in some fluffy roving.   It makes garments that are soft and fuzzy on the inside and super warm.  I love that thrumming incorporates color and texture into projects in new ways.  I was giddy.  I sent the post and patterns I found to knitting friends and tried to get them all on the thrumming bandwagon.

Where to start?  Well, I stopped at the local yarn shop on my way home, bought a hunk of roving for $6 and then came home and bought a slipper pattern that I adore: Cadeautje by Ysolda Teague.  The roving I bought is an odd mustardy green roving so I can’t make the cool rainbow slippers featured on the pattern yet, but I dug deep into my stash and found some really ancient chunky alpaca wool blend that meets the designers suggestion for yarn and looks pretty darn cool with the roving.

Let me lay this out to you.  For a $6 roving investment and a $5 pattern investment I am going to embark on a new stashbusting project to create wool/alpaca fluffy lined slippers.  Can you imagine anything more dreamy on your foot?   Then I can move onto mittens, funky earflap hats, and glasses cases.  It’s a miracle!  I am so excited.  Now, off to read a couple of thrumming technique blogs before I cast on.

Finally, I’ve gotta be honest here, thrumming?!?!  Can you imagine a cooler word for a new knitting technique?  Thrum, thrum, thrum.  Eeek!