My paternal grandmother was a very crafty person. She was born in 1923, the oldest of nine siblings; her life ended up being filled with all kinds of accomplishments, but it was not always easy, so perhaps her craftiness had more to do with necessity than creative expression. She sewed, knitted, embroidered, crocheted. She made most of my clothes growing up. The mother of two boys, she used to call me “her little girl”, though perhaps “doll” might have been more appropriate at times.
My grandmother passed away late last year, after several years of declining health and a very brief illness. At the time, I thought I was mentally prepared for the loss, but grief is a funny beast. It hides away, hibernating in some dark corner, lulling you into a false sense of peace. You think it’s safe to go down the halls of your memory, revisiting old rooms, marveling at long-forgotten details. Then one day – BAM! You open a door and walk straight into grief’s jaws. I think I am only now starting to process my grandmother’s death, each time I feel grief scraping against my bones.
One of my greatest regrets in life is that I didn’t learn all that I could have from my grandparents. That’s another loss that has taken me years to process, to understand fully. The irony of my current preoccupation with crafts isn’t lost on me. I’m now trying to learn, on my own, what I resisted being taught as a child. When my parents were clearing up my grandmother’s belongings, I ended up taking her craft supplies, bit by bit. First the embroidery stuff; then the sewing machine. A few weeks ago, I asked my mom for the knitting needles and yarn.
Basic knitting is one thing my grandmother did manage to teach me, in spite of my disinterest, some thirty years ago. I never did manage to make anything besides rectangles, and I gave it up entirely sometime in my teens. What can I say, I was always stubborn; the two of us had that in common. Recently, I was at the craft store looking for embroidery supplies, when my eyes were caught by some colourful knitting yarn. Without really thinking about it, I decided to pick up a couple of skeins and some needles. I felt as if my grandmother was watching, approvingly but also with amusement, which is strange considering that I don’t really believe in an afterlife (not to mention that she’d have better things to do with eternity than watching me wander down the aisles at Michaels). Anyway, that’s how it started: Adina’s Knitting Adventure.
Before asking my mom to bring me grandma’s old tools, I decided to tackle my first project – a scarf, naturally – using the supplies I bought.
But first, a warning: experienced knitters may want to stop reading now. The rest of this post is mostly a lesson in how not to approach a new hobby.
Ok, so let me start by saying that I remember and know nothing about knitting. I am also the kind of person who likes to figure things out as I go, and who prefers to learn by doing rather than researching in advance. This, I have come to learn, is something of a recipe for disaster when it comes to successful knitting. (If you’re like me, I recommend embroidery. You can learn about 80% of the essential stuff without ever watching a single YouTube video.) I also did not help myself by choosing to start with the chunkiest and fluffiest of yarns, simply because I loved the look (and feel) of it. Let me emphasize, again, that “winging it” is not a good approach to learning how to knit. But that is precisely what I did.
Confident that you cannot screw up knitting a rectangle, I pulled up a YouTube tutorial on my phone, ready to start my (new) first scarf. After about 5 attempts at casting on, each of varying degrees of success, I managed to get a proper start.
From here, I proceeded merrily on my way … until my first skein ran out. The tutorial talked about transitioning between skeins but, for the life of me, I was not able to get my fluffy demon yarn to behave properly. Oh well, I could deal with the extra hanging bits later, right? Right …
Because I was not working with a pattern, one thing I omitted to have in place was a gauge swatch. I was basically just knitting blindly – and having fun doing it, I hasten to add! – until I ran out of yarn. I only had about a foot and a half of length at that point, well short of a regular scarf. The only thing to do was … make a neck-warmer. I used the first and last hanging tails to “stitch” together the scarf (by hand because I didn’t know that wool needles are a thing that exists), then did my best to hide the evidence. This, by the way, is when I realized the importance of having a wool needle. Thank goodness for Amazon Prime, right? Right …
This is the end result:
It looks cute but it definitely has “newbie’s crappy first project” written all over it. It’s too wide for a proper neck-warmer (again, a gauge swatch would have helped probably), and too chunky. The underside is a horror scene I won’t show you, because I had to ultimately stitch in the tails because they just. wouldn’t. stay. put. Somewhere, my grandma is having a good chuckle.
Still, I felt like hot s**t; naturally, I decided I was ready for a more challenging project next (LOL for days). Circular needles, anyone?
I settled on making a hat because (a) it seemed like the next easiest thing to make; and (b) I need a hat. Being still innocent of useful information like the importance of a gauge swatch, I proceeded to cast on enough stitches to fit the head circumference of a nine-foot tall human. This, I sadly did not realize until about half way into the project, at which point I did what any self-respecting stubborn person who refuses to follow patterns would have done: decide I was making another neck-warmer.
I will say that making a neck-warmer on circular needles is easier than on straight ones, because you don’t have to worry about connecting the two ends. On the downside, I still couldn’t figure out a clean way of tying up my hanging tails, even using the wool needle which, by then, I had acquired.
But, third time’s the charm, right?
I still needed a hat, after all.
If you thought I would have researched a proper pattern and generally put more effort into preparing for this second go-around, you’d be wrong. I did use fewer stitches, and googled a tutorial that did not involve decreasing stitches to close up the hat.
The first attempt was … eh:
The second was … actually not bad. In the interim, I had acquired a much better yarn and also a thingamajig that makes P pom-poms. Wheeee!
By this point, a friend’s birthday was coming up and, naturally, I decided that the thing she would most like to get for her birthday (in late April) was … you guessed it … a knit hat. Listen, I had newfound skills and unwarranted confidence in said skills, ok? I made the same easy hat as the first time but I figured that my friend was too sophisticated for a Pom-Pom so I decided to go a different route. Using some yarn and felt from my embroidery projects, plus some old beads, I came up with a snazzy appliqué; slapped it on the hat and voila:
I feel a new niche hobby taking shape.
Somewhere, perhaps, my grandma is nodding, and smiling.
