A friend of mine asked me a question I've been asked several dozen times and I realized that this was a very appropriate topic for the blog (something I’ve been struggling with ideas for while I finish up my two projects).
"How long have you been knitting?" Or the usual companying variation, "How did you start knitting?"
Many eons ago, when I was a young thing about eight to nine years, give or take), two of my best friends—Simone and Kyx—were learning how to knit along with a growing trend of celebrities. They would chat about it or bring their knitting when we'd hang out. I guess I felt like a bit of a rube. I wanted to be able to participate with them.
One day the weatherman said a snowstorm was going to hit town and I sat back to watch the populace scramble in fear for toilet paper, milk, and rock salt as people in that area tend to do. My mother however grew up in Wisconsin and snow—feet or inches—didn’t bother her as long as she had someone to help her shovel. She put my little sister and I in the car and took us to the local craft store. Given the area’s history with snow she was pretty sure school would be out for a week or longer and she didn’t want any bored sibling infighting (my mom did this whenever we had enough warning on the storm, I actually learned how to build model cars just this way several years earlier; it didn’t stick quite the same though).
I picked up a beginner’s starting kit for knitting and some soft red yarn.
By the time the snow was all melted I had a nice, fringed, incredibly long scarf. It was the first thing I ever made and I still have it and wear it. It’s hanging on the back of my door right now.
My little sister, Tresa, likes to put into the story here the number of times I ripped out all or part of this scarf in the process.
It was a lot. I admit it. But mostly it was because I don’t really use gauges the way you are supposed to. I read that section of the little starter booklet but it seemed like a lot of unnecessary fuss then and I still feel that way now. So I still do a lot of ripping out in the first two to three rows and my work isn’t as precise as most serious knitters. Doesn’t bother me and I still think what comes out of it in the end is rather good regardless.
I learned a lot in that first piece. For one: Curling vs. Blocking. I still can’t get blocking to work. I’ve tried and tried and tried. So I just add features to my work when I know it will curl and I don’t want it to, ribbing, fridge, stockinette stitch.
That’s how I tend to look at knitting, how I tend to teach knitting. It’s a process and how you do it doesn’t have to conform, doesn’t have to be just like the starter book.
This was very hard for Laurie—a girl I was friendly with who wanted me to teach her. She’d look at the diagram of the book to see how she was supposed to hold the string to cast-on. And then she’d look at how I cast-on and see it was different and freak-out. My mother does it a third way and my grandmother did it another way completely. To each their own.
There is no right way, no definitive process.
To get all zen on you, knitting is like taking your clothes off. No two guys do it alike.
That all said, of the three of us (Simone, Kyx, and I), I'm the only one who still really knits...trends being what they are.
