Breakthroughs

I've been given the early Christmas gift of a headcold from the doctor, whose coworkers have been passing it amongst themselves - thankfully it's not too bad but it can slow me down for counts and decreases...I'm working on *something* for *someone* that requires a few decrease rows at the end, and then grafting live stitches and something that should've been an easy finish just took me an hour. Well I got it in the end, and as a bonus, suddenly grafting actually made sense to me!
For those of you who are wondering what on earth that might be, grafting refers to essentially sewing live stitches together. This is a useful finish when you want something to look seamless, and it saves the trouble of binding off and then sewing two edges together. However, it can be VERY tricky unless you actually visualize what you're doing in your mind - most of the time I end up with one side looking purled (the little bumps) and one side looking knit (the little vees) instead of BOTH looking knit. Today I had the first attempt: a weird mishmash. Second attempt: purled. Third (and final, no matter what I ended up with): the successful knit! This tutorial at Knitty gave me a hand today, though usually I'm scrolling up and down on the Purl Bee's Kitchener Stitch tutorial, which is also very useful.
In any case...now that I think I've suddenly got it, I'll get to put that to the test when I make a matching....*something*. Geez, gifting is hard when you're also blogging about it ;)