How jsins became a knitter: A tale that includes a couple of firsts, the last and the latest

I have a little tale to tell of how jsins, she of the limited attention span, went from declaring that she would never knit again to becoming the intrepid and obsessed knitter that she is today.

In a time long, long ago (1999ish), a career hobbyist was at Joanne Fabrics with her friend Mary Jo who was picking up supplies for her daughter's Girl Scout troup craft project when she spotted a brightly-colored variegated yarn in rainbow colors. Feeling inspired, she went to her local library and picked up a book on how to knit so that she could make herself the most amazing technicolored scarf that the world had ever seen. Excited about how cool her scarf was going to be, jsins immediately went home, opened the book and had her mother dig out her knitting needles. She knit and she knit and she knit.

Then she got bored and the scarf when into a basket next to the recliner chair in the living room. Every so often she would pull the scarf out of the basket and knit on it some more only to become bored with it again and set it aside. After about a year of such behavior, she had a garter stitch scarf that measured somewhere around 10 feet long. She was quite over knitting the scarf but stuck with it due to stubborn perseverance and a strong desire to prove to her mother that she would indeed finish it as there was much doubt. Upon casting off, jsins declared that she would never knit again and had her mother do the fringe. The end result was this:

A number of years pass by and one spring day in 2006, jsins once again ends up in a Joanne Fabric and while roaming around the store happens into the yarn section. Again, the yarn calls to her and she feels inspired. She purchases a few skeins that are on sale and heads down to the Barnes and Nobles located within the same shopping complex. Once there, she makes her way to the craft section and proceeds to pick up another knitting book. This time it is Stitch and Bitch: The Knitters Handbook by Deb Stoller. This time, jsins learns not only the knit stitch but also how to purl and knits the ribbed scarf from the book for practice but does not finish it before taking the leap to knitting in the round. Heading to a LYS, she picks up a few better yarns and proceeds to embark upon a project that is a bit more interesting than a garter stitch scarf (not to diss the garter stitch scarf as I still wear my 10-foot behemoth to this day) and a love affair with knitting is born. In a single weekend, jsins creates the following:
While knitting the Adults Only Devil Hat, jsins learns how to knit in the round, seed stitch, who to pick up stitches, do i-cord, increase, decrease and cast on additional stitches. The monotony of endless garter stitch is over and an intrepid knitter is born.

Now, jsins has a number of FOs under her belt and the career hobbyist who bounced from hobby to hobby, new project to new project, has a hobby that can keep her interest long enough to finish a sweater (Egads, who'd have thunk it?) and to tackles socks with very thin yarn on extremely tiny needles. Why just last week she finished the following:

With Rusted Root, she tackled lace and stuck through even the portion of knitting a sweater when you knit and knit and knit and it doesn't seem to grow at all! She's learned how to customize a garment through shaping so that it fits her just the way that she wants it.

Upon casting off her UnRusted Root, jsins immediately cast on for Juliet and has progressed to the start of the lace portion. This is her first garment using bulky yarn and she is quite enamored with how quickly it is knitting up but must admit that she is also looking ahead to what she will cast on next.