Knitting was not something I ever saw myself getting into in a million years. I remember sitting in the car on long trips with my mother, or in the living room with her while I watched television, where she was always knitting a scarf for either my sister or me. For years, I watched her work her magic with those two needles and make me colorful scarves that may have curled at the edges, but were still mine. One afternoon when I was about twelve, I went into her craft box and got out a pair of knitting needles and some yarn, casting on a bunch of stitches and desperately trying to remember how she’d made the first one into an actual stitch. Frustrated, I’d give up, and it would continue on that way until just a few years ago. She would have taught me herself, but as a mother with a full-time job and an unruly teenager, it didn’t happen.
At nineteen, I decided to pick up my own set of size ten knitting needles and set out to knit myself a scarf. At Wal-Mart, I picked out a skein of Red Heart variegated yarn in a muted rainbow tone, and at twenty-two, I finished it. It became a running joke between my friends and I every fall and winter, with them questioning if I would ever finish the scarf, and if they’d ever see it. When I finally finished the scarf it was admittedly too short, but it didn’t stop serving its’ purpose – I taught myself to edge scarves with fringe using the too-short scarf.
From scarves to blankets and most recently dishcloths, I have found something that I really love to do in knitting. After that scarf and with the power of the Internet, I have been teaching myself many new knitting projects and stitches, and am always working on something or another, or looking into my yarn stash for a new idea. I’m going to use parts of this blog to chronicle my story as a knitter - among other things!
