Bobbi, the gracious hostess of my SP10 group, asked us recently to post the answers to two questions—How old were you when you learnt to knit? and Who taught you?—on our blogs. I had actually been contemplately writing something about that, as I feel that learning about how someone came to learn about knitting gives certain important insights into why that person knits.
I actually learnt to knit twice, and the importance of this certainly goes a long way to explaining why knitting is such a huge part of my life now. The first time I was taught to knit I was at my first boarding school; my parents lived abroad at the time and they sent me to a school in the UK to provide some stability at a time when my parents moved every couple of years (in fact they moved back to Europe a year after I started at that school). I hated being at boarding school – I missed my parents and my brother, and I was pretty badly bullied (information that I only offer here as it is relevant to my state of mind throughout the majority of my 25 years and how that relates to being creative. That ghost has been laid to rest and will not feature heavily on this blog in the slightest). During my first year some bright spark amongst the staff thought that it would be a good idea if the girl boarders learnt to knit and embroider in the evenings. This was in 1994, so you can see how the attitudes at English boarding schools had not changed much since the 1700s – the boys certainly did not get knitting education! There is every chance that I actually enjoyed the knitting, but as the bullying sapped my confidence—at nine or at any time subsequently—to be different or to stand out, I spent many years desperately trying to fit in and denying my crafty side. So the needles were set aside as soon as the badly knitted bear was finished.
Fast-forward to roughly a year ago. Now, you may call me a bandwagon-jumper, you may call me a sheep (apt), but right around the time knitting became ever-so-slightly more acceptable, I developed a yearning to knit. But the fashionability or coolness factor alone would not have propelled me to knit had it not been for one very important element in my life, namely my boyfriend. For the first time here was someone outside my immediate family whose deep and enduring affection for me caused me to forget about the imaginary me that I thought the rest of the world was interested in, and gave me the courage to not particularly care what the rest of the world thought. The creativity that had been stifled for much of my life by the overriding fear that I was talentless came back in spades. I bought Debbie Stoller’s Stitch and Bitch book, taught myself with much cussing and hissy-fittage, and have not looked back since. It is a testament to the joy I find in knitting that, as someone who habitually charges full steam into new ventures only to cool off when things don’t go my way, I am still knitting a year in, my stash grows ever larger and my list of projects ever longer.
So, there you have it. How, when and why I learnt to knit in a large nutshell. How about you? How did you come to knit and why do you still?
Edit: Flickr is working again! So, just for Meshell…yarn porn!!
