How It All Began

Christians have conversion stories about how they converted to Christianity.  I've also got one of those, but this blog is a different genre, so I'll stick with How I Converted To Knitting.  It's true, I was converted.  By Vickie Howell.  I guess it started before her, but she was the main catalyst.

Knitting for me has been a learning experience, a development ... or to be more dramatic, a metamorphosis.  Hell, it could pass as a pure metaphor for my life.  I've made lots of mistakes, I've started back at square one, I've unraveled, I've gotten tangled up in knots, I've struck inspiration, I've hit dry spells, I've left things undone, I've improvised, I've broken rules, I've enjoyed successes and failures ... ok so I've never been much of a poet, but you get the idea.  One of these days, I'm going to tell my boss I need to frog back to the beginning and start over on one of my projects at work (in insurance, mind you), and she's going to look at me like I have baobabs growing out of my face.

I can't pinpoint what it was that first made me want to try knitting.  I do know I was in high school.  Maybe it was when my mom got involved in the prayer shawl ministry at church, and watching her, it just looked like something I could enjoy.  Maybe it was when I found out about my Grandma's book, Twice-Knit Knitting, the one that pretty much got my parents together (but that's a story for another day).  Things in my life just sort of seem to pop up as recurring themes before they feature as a main topic.

Or maybe I just found myself in the yarn aisle at the craft store.  Yes, in fact, I think that was it.  Glamorous?  No.  But there it is.  I was at one of those big box craft stores - you know, the ones that carry aisles and aisles of "yarn" (well now, someone's turned into a bit of a yarn snob).  I was with my mom, and I asked her if she'd teach me how to knit.  We bought a skein of plain, acrylic/wool worsted and a pair of needles, and the rest is history (too cliche ... argh, where do they hide the accent aigu?) thus a knitting phenom discovered her calling!

Um, hardly.  The needles felt awkward in my hands (despite having mastered other tactical challenges like folding origami cranes and using chopsticks - shout out to four years of Japanese exchange students: Sakura, Yoko, Maho, and Takako).  I couldn't grasp the concept of making a slipknot.  I started off with the only cast-on method my mom remembered - the simple one, where you essentially have a string of cursive "e's" on your needle.  I had at it for a while, reading along with I Taught Myself Knitting.  And I'm fairly certain I abandoned that first effort soon afterward.

But I picked it back up, I did.  Ok, so a few years went by, and I was in college, and I needed something to do between scenes of a college play. The second attempt only went slightly better than the first.  And I confess: I dabbled in crochet.  It became sort of an obsession.  I spent a few months crocheting to my heart's content.  And then I knit a scarf, I think.  And that was it for a while.  Techniques and terms and fibers and needles lay dormant, marinating.


Until 2006.  I was living in my first house, just purchased, and I stumbled upon the show "Knitty Gritty" with Vickie Howell, on HGTV.  I was hooked.  I DVR'd each and every episode.  I learned names like Lily Chin and techniques like "long-tail cast-on".  Something about seeing knitting up-close, performed live by real knitters ... I'd be lying if the pleasure I got didn't make me feel like something of a voyeur.  There was a flurry of fiber activity, and a true knitter was born.  After a seven-year progression from larva to pupa to chrysalis ... I was a beautiful butterfly.  Why yes, I do sicken myself sometimes with inclination to cliche (insert accent aigu).


From then, I knitted not just scarves, but hats, and mittens, arm warmers and socks.  I started a vest and sweater (I'm better at starting than finishing).  So I'm not an expert knitter, but I'm not a novice, either.  I'm proficient.  All thanks to Vickie Howell.


Which is why, right now, even though I have cast on and ripped out the same mitten four times, I refuse to bad-mouth the Vickie Howell for Caron's Sheep(ish) yarn, difficult though it may be, and though it splits and breaks and somehow refuses to follow its own gauge, I will not stoop to calling it cheap, or resort to name-calling, even though it's completely good for absolutely nothing.  Because I owe her.  She converted me to knitting.

Mrs. Pi