I think knitting is like a lot other hobbies - you often start out (relatively) cheap and then realize you want to spend a whole lot more money than you planned on, but it's not necessary.
I finished two projects yesterday. One is a pair of socks knitted from a traditional pattern (though slightly modified by me, didn't like parts of it) and the other is the hat for February, called Stripey. I'm pretty satisified with both, but the socks have some "concentration errors", where I couldn't be bothered to frog rounds to fix wrong stitches, so there are a couple of those here and there, and I'm not too big on the color combo. Figured I'd use up the yarn I had lying around, but ended up having to buy more, and now I have about the same amount leftover. Great. Anyways, first project with an afterthought heel, and it was scary, but kinda cool that it worked.
(Heel is same kind of "pointy" shape as the toe, bottom of sock is a kind of grid, back is the same as the front.)