The Blog Week question for today is: How and when did you begin knitting/crocheting?
I actually don’t remember learning to knit and crochet... I was so young when my mother taught me. She was an awesome knitter, and there were wonderful hand-knitted garments in our house. She had a cherry-red cabled cardigan that she knitted for herself in the 1950’s, and my father had hand-knit-by-her socks and an incredible tweedy cardigan, which I wore quite a bit in high school. I wore the cabled sweater when I was in college--it was to die for!
The houndstooth swatch pictured above was knitted by her, with itty bitty stitches. She was a much better knitter than I will ever be.
Funny thing, though, when the time came for our Girl Scout troop to do the needlework badge, some of the mothers taught us various skills like knitting, crochet, embroidery, etc., every week for about a month. My patrol (small group) went to the home of a mother from Germany, and a different patrol went to my house to learn from my mother. Well, not only did I already know how to do all the needleworking things we were learning, but the German mom was surprised that I used the German technique of holding my crochet hook. Oddly, I had changed my grip-style as a child to suit my own preference so I ended up crocheting like that instead of like my mother and grandmother. Go figure.
As for knitting style, I did my own thing, too. My mother showed me how to knit, and I couldn’t do the wrap-around-your-finger thing, so I just grabbed the working yarn and threw it over instead for each stitch. To this day, I still knit that way, and so does my daughter! I find that it goes fast, I can control the tension just fine, and I don’t have any problems with my wrists.So when my daughter came home from college in her first semester and she wanted to learn to knit, I happily showed her how. I’m quite sure my mother learned from her mother too.
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(Blog Week Day 1 tag: knitcroblo1)
