Knit and Crochet Blog Week

Starting Out - How and when did you begin knitting/crocheting? was it a skill passed down through generations of your family, or something you learned from Knitting For Dummies? What or who made you pick up the needles/hook for the first time? Was it the celebrity knitting ‘trend’ or your great aunt Hilda? 

So you'll be getting 7 blogs in seven days out of me!  I've decided since I now know how to knit AND crochet, that I will join in Knit and Crochet Blog Week... get those bloggy juices flowing

So... how did I begin knitting?  I wandered into a local yarn store on a spontaneous walk through a neighborhood other than our own one night and it just happened to be late night knitting night.  I wandered in, gazed in awe at all the yarns and then decided then and there that if I didn't know how to work with the yarn, I couldn't HAVE the yarn... so I signed up for a class and the rest is history... well, not exactly... The class got cancelled three times (post poned) and by then I'd already gotten my very first two balls of yarn (Noro Silk something or other... I now know not to throw the tags out, and Malabrigo Worsted) and my needles.  So I sat down with my laptop and taught myself to knit using youtube.  Not too shabby if I do say so!  of course the day I went to my class finally, the instructor asked what the H I was doing, because apparently I was yanking on the yarn and choking the needles with every stitch... as soon as I loosened that up, I was flying!


How did I learn to Crochet?  Well that was just a mere three days ago!  My friend Lara from our knitting group kindly sat with me in a coffee shop for 5 hours and taught me how to crochet so I could put the border on an otherwise semi-successful piece of knitting.  I'm now half way around the circle for the second of three times, and it's going well!  I have big plans to make a throw, and crochet in laceweight and and and... apparently my ability to stop myself from dreaming wasn't squelched by my new artistic output.
No one in my family knits... that I know of.  My mom crocheted a giant granny square blanket when I was a kid... white and peach... I wonder if she still has it.  My aunt made this awesome blanket and footstool cover out of some type of crochet flower generator thingy that I'm still trying to find... and that's it.  Oh, and my sister tried to learn while she was quitting smoking and by the third row on anything I understand that it was so tight she couldn't get her needle into the next stitch... she may have made a misshapen dishcloth...

So that's the beginning... it all happened March 2009 and if you look in the archives here you'll see a selection of items that I've made between then and now in my first year of knitting... not to shabby!

See you tomorrow!