Starting Out
How and when did you begin knitting/crocheting? was it a skill passed down through generations of your family, or something you learned from Knitting For Dummies? What or who made you pick up the needles/hook for the first time? Was it the celebrity knitting ‘trend’ or your great aunt Hilda?
For me, learning to crochet after learning how to knit was like trying to learn how to snowboard once I'd learned to ski--one thing is hard enough to perfect, so let's not muddy the waters yet. For me, the question is just "How and when did you being knitting?"
I started knitting my junior year at Purdue, after one of my friends on the rowing team decided to knit her soon to be formed niece a baby blanket. I don't know what drew me to it; it wasn't gorgeous yarn (she was using acrylic--we didn't know any better) and it certainly wasn't the coolness factor (I can remember her knitting at this regatta during some cold fall weather, sitting in a chair with a blanket over her legs looking totally like a 22 year old grandma) but I knew I wanted to learn too. She showed me how to do the long tail cast on and the knit stitch; by then we'd exhausted her knitting knowledge. Her mom and sister were also knitters, so they had let her borrow some pamphlets that showed how to do fancy things like purl.
And that is the story of much of my knitting 'career'--teaching myself techniques out of books. There are no knitters in my family, no one to ask if they could show me how they do something. I ran away with it, while my friend lost interest; I was fascinated with different ways of doing stitches and how everything interlocked together. The first time I felt that I had actually come a long way was working on the Silken Scabbard pattern as a present for my Mom; I could predict what was supposed to come next, I could tell when I was doing something incorrectly, and I could correct my mistakes without unraveling all the way back to them--I could just drop the stitch down and finagle it until it was correct. It was the first time I felt that I could truly 'read' my knitting, and it was an awesome realization!
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Your "22 year old grandma" comment made me laugh-that's almost what my FIL said when I had to knit in front of them in order to get a Christmas present done. "Isn't that what old women do?" lol. I felt the same way you did when I read my knitting for the first time!
ReplyDeleteI recently told someone that I'm an 80-year-old woman in a 25-year-old woman's body. So yeah, I definitely know where you're coming from.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment, and thanks for sharing your knitting origins! I was trying to use a bit of self-deprecating humour when I referred to my blog post as navel-gazing - pointless introspection and self-absorption. Not meaning to take away from the exercise on the whole, of course :)
ReplyDeleteThere must be an awful lot of young grandma's knitting, I took my niece to a short lived youth knitting group. A couple of the 12 years olds have been knitting for about as long as I have, four/five years.
ReplyDeleteThe reason you wanted to knit probably has everything to do with the type of brain that you have; an engineering brain. Is it the left or the right brain people that love math, puzzles, accounting, organizing, engineering, etc. I believe knitting belongs in that list too. I did accounting for over ten years and am totally addicted to knitting, and am currently enjoying crocheting as well. Somehow, these types of hobbies where lining all of those uniform stitches up and having to count and think about the design really stimulates our brains. We're just lucky I guess, we discovered knitting.
ReplyDeleteI'm self-taught, too. I didn't even have a friend to teach me (well, I had one friend in high school who knit. She was weird and cool and occasionally brought her pet hedgehog to school in her purse, but didn't teach me to knit.)
ReplyDeleteYour silken scabbard is gorgeous!
I think the only reason I finally caught on to knitting was because of You Tube if that hadn't been around I don't know what craft I would be doing if any.
ReplyDeleteI am so proud of all your talents and abilities. You rock! Thanks for the silken scabbard.
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