First project: some advice

Now you've learned to purl and knit, to cast-on and off and the basic stitches: garter, rib, and seed, you're ready to go. If you haven't, go back to my previous post.

Your first project should be something simple that serves the main purpose of practising. This doesn't mean you won't be able to wear the end product, you probably will. Here are a few thoughts and recommendations.

1. Choose the right yarn. First and foremost choose a simple and easy to knit-with yarn, no fancy mohair, bouclés, thin-and-thick yarns, you'll regret it. Remember you're practising, you'll have plenty of opportunity to use your dream yarn once you've got the hang of it.
2. Choose the right yarn colour. It's better to use a light colour. Very dark colours make it very difficult to see the stitches and you'll need to see what you're doing because you'll need to learn to distinguish the look of stitches and learn to identify mistakes so you can fix them. 
3. Choose the right yarn (I know I'm repeating myself, I apologize for my lack of imagination). I see a lot of people recommending to use super-chunky yarn. The reason for this is that very thick yarn knits much faster, just think of it as many less stitches per square meter, and one of the big problems with beginners is that they're so slooowww. Most people will end up quitting after spending weeks on their first project and still being far from half-way-through. Nightmare!!! However I don't recommend this. The reason is that I personally found it more difficult to use very thick needles while I was learning. So my recommendation is use yarn that is appropriate for 5-7mm needles. This will be called worsted, aran or chunky and is an intermediate yarn, neither too thin (avoid the never-ending-project nightmare by all means), nor too thick. 
4. Choose a simple project (most people start with a scarf), but not too simple,   most people start with a garter stitch scarf and usually bore themselves to death, or more frequently and much less dramatically bore themselves to quitting to knit even before the end of their first project, which is a real shame! The other big disadvantage of a garter stitch scarf is that you won't learn anything but the knit stitch which is a waste of a perfectly nice opportunity to learn the purl one. My advice, do a scarf with textured stripes, then you can practice lots of stitches: garter, stocking, seed, rib, moss, you name it, use your imagination. 
5. Think your project well before beginning if you want to use what you've knitted. Choose a nice yarn and a nice colour, you can do that even considering what is said above about the yarn, unless maybe you're a Goth and only wear black (just kidding, at least my Goth friends do wear other colours occasionally). Choose a nice looking project, as long as it is simple and small enough. I recommend a scarf, because it is the simplest of all projects, but you can do a very easy hat which has the advantage of being almost as simple and smaller (translate to faster to finish) than a scarf. I'm preparing a couple of very easy patterns to illustrate this for one of my next posts.
6. My humble advice is no matter how hard it was to get those first rows done, if you get to a point where you realize the your project is coming out wrong, whether you did too many mistake or got the size wrong, UNDO your work and start again. The reason I say this is, first, you're almost surely not even half way through so why go along and end up with something you don't want to wear? Second, I'm sure by now you're much better at it, so once you start again you'll find that you've quickly reached the same point and with considerable less mistakes on the way. Hey, I once started a project 5 times, and I'm only a beginner with a few projects on my portfolio (I know, I know, only a beginner and already have a "portfolio"? I'm fancy. You say pretentious, I say fancy). 

The nice thing about a scarf is that you'll only have to choose the yarn and the width to begin with. The length you can always decide on the go: just cast-off when you think you're done. If you're doing a scarf think approximately how wide you want it too be. I say approximately because as a beginner you won't be able to predict the end result with much accuracy. Then use the reference that comes with your yarn to choose how many stitches to cast-on. Am I talking Chinese? Here is an attempt at translation:

Every yarn comes with what is called a gauge measure (at least I hope that is what it is called, I'm terrible with this technical names). This should say something like so-many stitches (and rows) to so-many inches. For example the yarn I'm using now says 21 stitches per 4in. Now you only have to do simple arithmetic, say I want a 20in-wide scarf, then I should cast-on 105 stitches. Then again 20in is a lot, maybe I should go for something smaller, remember the nightmare I mentioned above? If I do a 10in scarf, I'll be done in half the time. Decisions, decisions. Think about it before you start, but don't overdo it. I mention this because I made the mistake of making a scarf I don't particularly like because it's too thin and this year's fashion is very wide scarves (it'll change soon I know). Later, I'm kind of ashamed to admit it, I did the opposite mistake. I didn't want to repeat the same mistake so I started another scarf which is too wide. If you do the same mistake remember my advice: stop and start from the beginning when you realize you've done a mistake, no matter how far you've reached. There is no point in continuing if you'll never use it in the end.

And yes, you'll be able to use your first project.