The Beginnings

Day One: How and when did you begin knitting/crocheting?

It actually took me a few starts before I started knitting and didn't stop.  

Step 1
My Mom used to knit when I was young, and I think I was probably 7 or 8 when she showed me the basics enough to make a tiny blanket for one of my toy horses.  I think I patiently knit it to about 2 x 3 inches before she took it off the needles for me.  I don't remember much about the experience and for whatever reason she didn't knit much after that and so neither did I.


Step 2

Yes, the infamous eyelash yarn scarf

Then in 2004 I bought purple fun fur yarn to glue onto part of a Halloween costume.  When Halloween had passed and I still had purple fun fur staring me down, I took the yarn to my Mom and borrowed some of her needles and had her help me get started on a simple scarf.  It wasn't a good project to reintroduce me to knitting -- the fun fur obscured the stitches so that it was very hard for a new knitter to see knits or purls or even count the stitches.  I managed to keep it going until a good scarf length, but by the end I found I was somehow increasing stitches on one side with every other row or so.  Of course the good thing about not being able to see the stitches was that I just finished the scarf, folded over the crooked increased edge until the scarf looked straight, and sewed it down flat so the ends matched.  It was actually a warm and comfy scarf and I wore it a lot -- probably much more than anyone with fashion sense would approve of.  But it obviously wasn't the best project and I didn't have any knitting aspirations beyond using up the yarn I already had so it didn't go any further.

Off and Running
Sometime after that (and maybe she'll tell her own story here sometime), Xandermommy got into knitting and at a later point provided some initial materials and taught Sariebeth how to knit, too.  I resisted for a while and even though we included some yarn stores on a shopping trip with the girls for them, I didn't want to jump in on a project with expensive yarn.  But I had been dabbling in sewing and browsing the joann.com website for projects and came across a basic knitted afghan.  So, in October of 2008, after repeated promptings from Xandermommy to join in the knitting frenzy, I ordered the necessary bulky acrylic yarn from the JoAnn website, printed the free pattern, and started using the tutorials on the Lion Brand website to remind myself how to knit.  With giant US 17 (12.75 mm) needles and the yarn held doubled, the afghan went quickly.  I did my best to seam the panels together based on the tutorials, but it's certainly not the best creation ever.  Still, it was a large accomplishment and our cats love it.

My first socks

Since I finished a knitted object and had joined the knitters, we took a class at a local yarn store on fixing knitting mistakes.  I had a bit of a hard time keeping up since I barely knew anything past knit and purl at that point, but I learned a lot.  After about a month of other small projects to use up some of the basic yarn I bought for the afghan and the class, Xandermommy made me choose some sock yarn from her stash so that I could try knitting socks.  And then the knitting truly began.  I sat with yarn and needles in hand in front of my laptop or computer and worked my way through tutorials for yarn overs and short row heels and how to kitchener toes closed.  I became brave enough to make things for other people (just family at first, of course) and followed Xandermommy and Sariebeth on trips to the local yarn stores.  We even went to a few knit nights together.


I've since joined a sock club that sends me kits periodically, Xandermommy and I went to Stitches Midwest 2009 and are prepping for 2010, and I've amassed a tidy stash.  For the moment, at least, I'm pretty well entrenched as a knitter.  Of course, crafty hobbies like this tend to ebb and flow for me, so it's possible that it will get pushed aside some day only to resurface again years later.  At less than 2 years from my true jump into knitting, only time will tell, but I've certainly learned a lot that won't be so hard to pick back up later.