When you’re a knitter, there’s a couple of questions that you always get asked:
“You’re knitting?!” – No, I’m playing the harmonica…
“What’s that?!” – (I quite like this one) Oh this old thing…? Well, it’s just a little project I’m working on…
“How long have you been knitting for?!” – It’s this one that I’m going to answer here. Every knitter has this story and this is my version.
Flash back to October 2010… Those crazy, hazy days…
My darling housemates bought me a fantastic-looking book called Knitting Mochimochi by Anna Hrachovec with an amazing selection of strange, knitted creatures and I experienced the first inkling of the common knitter’s impulse of “KNIT ALL THE THINGS”. Only problem, at that point, I couldn’t knit. Slight issue.”Oh,” they said “we assumed you could knit!” – and that was that. My destiny was set.
Like quite a lot of people, I tried when I was rather younger but the complexity of the pointy sticks and the wool and the yarn-goes-here, put-the-needle-here, in-round-through-off business was just far too baffling so I gave up and went back to watching The Simpsons or whatever I was doing. This time around, however, I was determined…
I started by pestering my mother and my brother’s girlfriend to help me learn and I went along to John Lewis in Peterborough (impossibly glamorous, I know) to pick up knitting supplies… I grabbed a large ball of chunky, squidgy, navy-blue acrylic (“that’s enough for a scarf, surely?” yes, I know, I know) and some needles (enormous, plastic 6mm ones) and excitedly went home to learn.
Why does everyone start off with a scarf? They take forever and that’s not what you want as a newbie! Knit a suitably-sized square, fold it in half and sew up the edges and you’ve got yourself an iPod sock – bam! Instant gratification! Anyway, I started with a scarf. More of a stole, really – barely stretching around the neck once – but I did it! Yes, the gauge may have ranged from ‘impossibly tight’ to ‘absurdly loose’ and I may have dropped and added stitches at random (which made it have a fascinating, wavy edge – entirely deliberate, I promise) but it was done!
And that was it, I was hooked. I went on to try doing cushion covers, more scarves and other square things and, yes, the knitted creatures from my first ever knitting book.
An early knitted effort
Chunky navy acrylic was my gateway drug and I’m now hopelessly addicted…
domesticated science 