monkeymom's Diaryland Diary
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Let me hear an amen!
I've been knitting on the new sweater for Kim all day, and it's a little silly because there is no way it will be done in time for her to wear it this weekend. Oh well. It's fun to make, and she can wear it when she comes home for Thanksgiving in two weeks.
Yesterday there was a question in my comments about how I learned to knit, and since there is nothing interesting happening at my house today, I'm going to tell you.
Oh, but first, I did go out today to get my hair colored. Kim was going out of town today, so she left about the same time I did. She is meeting a couple of her friends in Wisconsin to go to a play. I think there was some video game playing planned, also.
So I learned to knit when I was 10, sort of. It was a thing that girls learned in Primary. We were taught to embroider, to crochet and to knit. Who remembers this? The embroidery project turned out better for me than either the knitting or the crocheting.
I was a terrible knitter! My mother wasn't able to teach me, and she said it was because I was knitting left-handed (I am right-handed). She asked around to find someone who could knit left-handed, and found that one of the student teachers at my school was a left-handed knitter, and I met with her a couple of times, but I don't think I had any real success. That was in fourth grade.
In fifth grade, my best friend Phyllis showed up at school one day with some knitting! She sat in front of me in class, and I watched over her shoulder as she knit, and aha! It became clear! I went home and showed my mother that I could knit, and then I don't think I did any knitting again until I was in high school.
When I was in high school, I had a subscription to a magazine called Young Ingenue, and one month they featured a cute sweater with the pattern to knit one for yourself. It was a crew-neck sweater, closely fitting, and it had a heart on the front. I remember the model sweater was knitted in an odd color like khaki, but I made mine in red (Heart) with a white heart. I think the neck ribbing and the cuffs were white, too.
I never finished the sweater, and I lost the pattern, but a few years later my sister Inger bought some yarn and a pattern to make a very complicated cabled sweater with a kangaroo pouch on the front and a large hood. I loved it and I wanted to make one, too.
I went with my mom to a yarn store in the Nickels Arcade in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and bought the same wool as Inger's in a darker color, and we both made the sweater. We actually finished them and wore them, but later we both either gave them away or threw them out. I can't believe I did that!
When we made those sweaters, Mom had to go over the instructions with us, line by line, and show us how to do each part, because we couldn't read a pattern. I don't remember doing any finishing, so I think that probably Mom sewed them up when we were done.
For the next few years, I would get interested in knitting something about once a year, and I'd buy some yarn and needles, make the project, finish it, and then forget about it for another year or so. Mom still sewed together the pieces of any sweater when it was finished.
Back then I didn't know about gauge, so I would buy the yarn and needles specified in the pattern, and I didn't know why things didn't always come out the size they were meant to be. I could read a pattern, sort of, and if I found anything too confusing, I could call my mom on the phone and ask her to clarify. Sometimes I followed the directions, and didn't realize that I was doing it wrong, or that there was a better way. Mostly things looked okay.
When Kim was a baby, my neighbor saw me knitting, and said she could show me a better way. She taught me to knit Continental, but all the time she was teaching me, I was thinking that as soon as she left, I was going to go back to doing it my way! After she went home, I started knitting American again, and decided it really was better her way, so that's when I changed my style.
A year later, I met Shelly, who taught me to purl correctly! I had been knitting with a twisted stitch all those years, and one of my knitting mentors has mentioned it to me more than once, but she couldn't figure out how I was twisting it. When she watched me knit, it looked fine, but the finished product was a twisted stitch. Shelly saw that I was wrapping the yarn the wrong way on the purl stitch, which caused my knit stiches to twist, and she corrected me. She was very annoying about it, but my knitting looked better.
Shelly was knitting baby sweaters for sale in her mother's yarn shop, and she encouraged me to make some baby sweaters to sell, too. She gave me the pattern, helped me get the yarns I needed, and I had a lot of fun cranking out baby sweaters! I even sold a few!
I taught myself to knit without looking at my hands while I was making all those baby sweaters. I did it by knitting while watching TV, and just concentrating on feeling what my fingers were doing while looking straight ahead at the television. I remember really getting the hang of it during late nights watching a British comedy show called Are You Being Served on a Canadian TV station.
That was when I became a constant knitter, and started taking a little basket of knitting with me wherever I went so I could pull it out to work on when I had a few minutes.
When we moved to Freeport, the internet was a brand new thing, and there was an email list for knitters, that you could subscribe to, and get lots of emails every day from all over the country (and occasionally out of the country)! It was an amazing thing! If I had a question, there were people who could answer it, and they shared patterns and knowledge, and even yarn!
That's when my knitting really took off, and I learned to make mittens, and socks, and found out about knitting with wool! I remember how excited I was to find that I could buy real wool from Mary at the Spinning Shop! I hadn't been able to get wool until then, because my yarn at that time was all from Km*rt or Ben Fr*nklin.
Eventually the internet became more widespread and then you could (wow!) buy things over the internet, and also, knitting was becoming popular and it was easier to find good yarns. And now, years later, I have access to all the yarn in the world through the internet, and so much yarn in my house that it has its own room!
So that is the story of my knitting. I still learn knew things, and I love to teach other people to knit! It's so exciting when someone that I taught tells me they are teaching someone else! We're spreading the gospel of knitting!
7:30 p.m. - 2008-11-08
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