How I Learned to Knit

Well ducklings, I think it’s time I told you the story of how I learned to knit. It’s a long one.

It’s hard to know exactly where the story starts, but we’ll begin when I was in kindergarten. I used to sit in front of the television watching Sesame Street and peeling the paper wrappers off crayons. I could do this for HOURS. It didn’t matter if the TV was on or not, as long as I had my crayons to peel. I perpetually had brightly colored wax under my fingernails…I went though boxes and boxes of the Crayola 64 Crayon set. Don’t get me wrong–I did plenty of drawing and coloring too–but crayon peeling was my meditation activity and luckily, my parents recognized this and facilitated it.

This habit I grew out of, but I was always the type of kid who needed to be doing something with my hands at all times. I was really into fuse beads (remember those, from the early 90’s?) once my fine motor skills got a little better…finger knitting…oh dear god the finger knitting. I had miles of that shit. MILES. And there were plenty of other crafty hobbies along the way.

Meanwhile, both my mom and her mom, my grandmother, were knitters. My grandma–Mama, I called her–knit me dozens of intarsia sweaters when I was little. I had one with a sheep, one with a dinosaur, one with crayons (the crayon-peeling was a family legend, I guess)…

Anyway, both Mama and my mom tried many times to teach me how to knit throughout my childhood and into my adolescence to no avail. It looked impossibly difficult to me and I just did not have the patience to sit with them and figure it out.

Fast forward to 2009. I had just graduated from college, having studied mostly writing and having had internships and summer jobs in the publishing world. I couldn’t find a job and I was stressed out. Even though I was applying for publishing jobs, I was kind of nervous about getting trapped in that field, having had more work experience there than in any other field (excepting waiting tables). Still, I kept applying for jobs, not getting them, and finally, sometime in June or July, I took a job at a local cafe.

I actually really enjoyed working at this cafe. I was good at it, despite my hatred of coffee, and there were customers who wouldn’t order a latte unless I was behind the counter (seriously). I made friends with Scott the Baker, who supplied the cafe with baked goods, and, at the time, I was really into cake decorating and he had mentioned needing an assistant or something (it never quite worked out).

On Saturdays at the cafe, there was a knitting group that met in the mornings. I mentioned this to my mom, since she was a knitter, and she started going (she mentioned to the knitters that I was her daughter and my tips got way better). Anyway, the knitters, including the owner of the cafe, who was also a knitter, really wanted to teach me to knit. I was resistant for a while, but I started looking at the kinds of things they made, and I was intrigued. A pair of cabled fingerless gloves was particularly attractive to me, and I decided I’d let them teach me. I remember my mom saying to me, “You know, you won’t be able to knit those gloves right away…it’ll take a few years.” And I remember thinking, “….Why?”

So, as kind of a group effort, they taught me how to knit: “Under the fence, grab the sheep, back under the fence, away he leaps.” I clenched my toes the whole time and was not convinced I was doing it correctly, but something about it felt so…right. I LOVED it. When the cafe closed for the day I took my little rectangle home with me and worked on it all the rest of the day. The next day the owner of the cafe taught me how to purl. And then how to use double pointed needles. I found a book of my mom’s, went shopping for some yarn in our attic, found some red Blue Sky Alpacas Worsted Hand Dyes, and picked out a pattern for a mitered-triangle scarf. Went on youtube and figured out how to knit front and back and ssk. The rest is history.

At the same time I was discovering all this, my grandma, Mama, had gotten really sick. She needed a small valve repair in her heart, which they had planned to do laproscopicly, but during the procedure they found that she actually needed triple bypass surgery, which they did without consent. She was 87. She survived the surgery, but never fully recovered…we visited her often and my mom was so proud to show her that I was knitting. Mama asked for some yarn and needles, which we got for her, but she didn’t live to use them.

A certain, sentimental part of me likes to think that in a way, a bit of her spirit lives on, in my knitting. I like to think she’d be proud of me now.