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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