My Knitting Journey

For the story that I will be telling in task three, I will be sharing my experiences and journey with knitting. Knitting has been something that I’ve been doing my whole life. I first got into knitting from my mom. She needed before she had me, so she had all the knitting needles, techniques, and patterns to share with me. Before the accessibility with YouTube, she would teach me all the things that I need to know with a knitting. I remember the first project I made was a scarf and it was a very simple long rectangular shape. I started knitting when I was about 10 call Mom but i been knitting on and off my whole life. In high school and University, I made a few projects including a hat, a few neck warmers, and my very first sweater that I made for my boyfriend. Now that I am working full time, I don’t have a lot of time to pursue my own hobbies and projects. I am very involved with teaching, doing my masters, and running an Etsy Shop. However, over this past winter break I have we found my love and interest for knitting. I stumbled upon an old friends Instagram and found out that she has a small business where she hand dies yards. This peaked my interest and I went down a rabbit hole of looking for patterns and styles that I like. I’m really interested in making garments for myself because I really like fashion and clothes. I really like how with the knitting I can choose the colors that I want the Garment to be in and change up the sizing or length. This is appealing to me because I am 15th, and certain garm

ents don’t fit the best on me because of my size. So now I’m in the middle of making my first turtleneck for myself, which I will include a picture of in my post. It currently doesn’t look like much but it’s a lot of progress that I’ve made in the past 2 weeks. I also think I’m making garments is really special especially when gifting, is the recipient will know that a lot of time and love went into making it and it wa

sn’t mass-produced in a factory. I also really like the process of knitting and choosing out the different Yarns that I can make the garments with. I really like using Merino wool and i’ve been doing a lot of yarn shopping within the past month just experimenting with different fibers and brands. I’m really excited about the projects that I have planned for the year and I hope to make lots of knitwear this year.

 

1. How does the text deviate from conventions of written English?

 

For this speech to text response, I used the website, Speechnotes. In some places, the text was more conversational in comparison to how I would have written this response. There were a lot of contractions, which I normally do not use in formal writing. I also used the punctuation features that Speechnotes had, but there may have been some instances where I forgot to say “comma” or “period”. 

 

1. What is “wrong” in the text? What is “right”?

 

For the most part, Speechnotes was fairly accurate. However, there were some errors if I spoke too fast or if I did not enunciate the words enough. For example, where it says “10 call Mom”, I had said 10 years old. Later on, it says “I have we found my love”, when it should have been “re-found”. When I go on to talk about why I like knitting garments, it says “because I am 15th” when I had said “I am petite”. There were also some random words (a, I’m) that were included that I do not recall speaking. I think the speech to text was fairly accurate because I took my time with telling the story, and I was also going slow and reading the text as I was saying it. I think that if I had not looked at the screen and just told the story, there would have been more errors.

1. What are the most common “mistakes” in the text and why do you consider them “mistakes”?

 

When reading the text, I found that a common mistake throughout was random capitalization of certain words. For example, garment, merino, and yarn were capitalized in the middle of the sentences, and they were not used as proper nouns. This could be a specific Speechnotes problem, not so much a problem with all speech to text applications. Another common mistake that might not be unique to Speechnotes are homonyms. In my text, Speechnotes used “hand died” instead of “hand dyed”. The website did not know the context of the sentence or the term, so it wrote the wrong word.

 

1. What if you had “scripted” the story? What difference might that have made?

 

If I had “scripted” the story, I think it would have sounded more like a speech, rather than a conversation. The overall effect of the story would have sounded intentional, because I would have had an opportunity to refine and edit the story. I also think that if I had scripted it, it would have been even more sequential, as I would have had more time to think about what I was going to say, as sometimes I am a bit scatterbrained.

 

1. In what ways does oral storytelling differ from written storytelling? 

 

Oral storytelling is definitely more conversational given its nature. I think oral storytelling allows for more spur of the moment additions, and written storytelling can sound rehearsed. In the experiences that I have been a part of oral storytelling, there have been opportunities for discussion and questions, which made the experience more authentic and engaging.