Seeing my friend Sophie's knitting blog makes me think I need to do this. I'm not good at keeping a knitting journal, even though I recommend the practice to my knitting students. I've been knitting for around 30 years (some of them continuously).
I started as a kid with a bunch of library books. I don't know where I got the idea that I wanted to knit. My mother's hobby of choice has always been sewing. But I knew only one person who did knit, a school friend's mom. I was way too shy to ask her to teach me to knit. So I turned to my reliable old friend the library. I checked out every book I could find on knitting. It took me a while to figure out a method. I thought that everything started with ribbing, so I learned ribbing first. Talk about doing things the hard way. No one was there to tell me otherwise. I found out years later, and many books later, that the method I taught myself now has a name, "combination knitting". It is described in the self-published Confessions of a Knitting Heretic by Annie Modesitt. I never ran into the "knitting nazis" that Annie describes in her book who would tell me I was knitting "wrong", because, being an introvert, I never exposed myself to such public display.
Throughout junior high, high school and college, I never had much money to spend on yarn. But there were always well meaning adults who would give me their leftovers. And there was always the library for more books about knitting. I probably spent more time reading about knitting than actually knitting, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
After college and all the way on the other side of the continent I discovered three things that changed my knitting life; 1) REAL yarn stores; 2) Maggie Righetti's and Elizabeth Zimmerman's books (you guessed it, at the public library); and 3) Patternworks mail order catalog, at the time called Hard-To-Find Things for Knitters. Maggie took me down the path of continental knitting and really looking at my own work. Elizabeth Zimmerman opened my eyes to many things, not the least of which was the beauty of circular knitting. My Knitter's Rule Jr from Patternworks got me thinking about the correct gauge and actually making things that fit. I still was not to have any contact with other knitters until I moved to Washington state 8 years down the road.
2 comments:
Et tu, Loretta?
I did not figure out that I was a combination knitter until this fall when I stumbled on Annie Modesitt's website.
And...get this - after reading about it, I realized I'd almost never actually sat with another knitter and looked at the way they knit. Except for that evening in the Fairhaven, and as far as I could tell at the time, we both knit pretty "normal". LOL!
I didn't figure it out until reading Maggie Righetti's Knitting In Plain English. She encourages you to "admire" your work frequently and really know what those stitches are doing. I just knew that certain stitch patterns did not work with the way I knit (pre-1987 anyway). I did convert over to a left-hand carry (continental) at that point. I do carry one color in the left hand and one in the right when I do two color knitting.
After reading Priscilla Gibson-Roberts Ethnic Socks & Stockings I realized that combination knitting is a combination of the eastern (twisted) purl and knitting into the back of the knit stitch western style to correct the stitch mount the next time around. I didn't realize that all my k1p1 ribbing was twisted. But if I examine the evidence found in a box of my old knitting. That was indeed the case. I twist ribbing on purpose now lots of times, because I think it looks beautiful.
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