Knitty Strangelove

Or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Yarn

How old was I when I learned to knit? Crikey. I was 37-years-old.

Uh-huh. I was 37.

My mother tried to teach me when she learned to knit, but I was in my teens and I wouldn't do anything that my mother thought was cool when I was in my teens. Funny, I'm still a bit like that.

I was in my very late 20's when someone (Cheryl, I think her name was) tried again to teach me to knit. She was patient and weird and always seemed to be wearing a garment that Joseph and his Technicolor Dreamcoat would be coveting and sighing over. She tried to teach me to knit Continental style. I took the yarn with me everywhere and practiced all the time and it was disastrous. I was like someone who doesn't speak the language of the country they're in, but doesn't know that that they don't speak the language. I would stare at her in total confusion all the time, trying to figure out why bizarre words kept falling out of her mouth and why she was making useless hand gestures. Luckily for me, she was a temp and the day she left the company I worked for, I threw the yarn and the needles in a heap on the floor in the corner of my office and never looked at them again. Those needles and that yarn are still there for all I know - I didn't pack them when I left.

I was 36 the third time I tried to learn to knit. I drove 51 miles away from my home to go to a knitting studio in S.F. and took the first half of a two-part class from a wonderful, competent, imperturbable teacher named Helen Kim. Once at home, I (stupidly) took my yarn off my needles to correct a mistake I'd made (I didn't know how to tink back then). I tried to cast back on and lost my mind. I couldn't do it for the life of me. Nothing I tried worked and there was no LYS near me at the time and I certainly didn't know about Knitting Help.com. I'd very recently had pretty major surgery and was feeling like poop on a stick anyway, so I didn't go back for the second half of the class. I gave up on ever being a knitter.

Four months into my 37th year, I went to a newly opened LYS that was about a half-mile away from my apartment. I took a beginning knitter's class taught by a woman named Merrilyn Tuma. She was a professor, a chef and a fabulously prolific knitter. She taught the class as a four-week sojourn and we didn't learn to cast on until the very last week. It sounds daft, but it worked. The first week we literally just learned the knit stitch. She cast on for us and made us knit - mistakes and all. We practiced the knit stitch for a week and then came back the second week to learn the purl stitch. A week later we learned to make stripes and then - one week later, while our confidence was high - we learned to cast on and bind off. Sweet. She taught the class to knit English and it just clicked for me. She was fun and funny and encouraging and unflappable. She reminded us that we were learning new skills as adults and that that was often harder. She confided in us that she'd knit many a terrible sweater before she became the knitter she is today. She kept us honest by giving us homework ("knit half this ball of yarn by the time I see you next") and she gently taught me to do something I'd begun to think I could never do.

I owe her a huge debt of gratitude. I love to knit. I think about my needles and yarn sometimes when I'm away from them.

In not quite two years I've made a beautiful throw from the Colinette AbFab pattern, two felted handbags, a veritable cornucopia of scarves (including the infamous and ubiquitous Clapotis from Knitty - it was a wonderfully satisfying knit), a shawl, a laptop bag (that I felted in part at my sister's house in the States and in part on an oil tanker while travelling from Singapore to Hawaii) and one hateful sweater.

Right now I need to put the finishing touches on my Gryffindor scarf, do the sewing on what will be yet another felted hand bag, rip the crap out of a mini clapotis (only to start it again) and start the body proper of a to-be-felted carpet bag.

Then I really need to get busy.

So many projects, so little time.