My very first post was about how I got started knitting.  For Knit and Crochet Blog Week, I’m going to revisit that post and tell you how and why I started knitting.

I think it was about ten years ago when I first got interested in knitting.  I had just gotten married, and I was in grad school.  Those years in grad school were some of the worst in my life.  I was miserable and unsure about the path I had chosen for myself.  I think it was this feeling of failure and, oftentimes, of utter despair that led me to knitting.  I’ve written in the past about my roots growing up in Appalachia (I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my Appalachian heritage and how I’m not that far removed from it).  My paternal grandmother did (and still does) a lot of traditional handcrafts.  She crochets and she makes beautiful quilts by hand.  I think at that time I was looking for a way to reconnect with my roots and to find myself again.  Knitting was the answer.  Except it wasn’t at first.

I was grocery shopping at Meijer’s, which has a craft section much like a WalMart, when I walked past the craft aisle.  On a whim, I picked up a skein of burgundy acrylic yarn and two pairs of needles.  I went to the library and checked out a few knitting books.  I caught on to casting on instantly.  I could do a long tail cast on like nobody’s business.  I could not, however, do anything else.  No matter what I tried, what book I read, what tutorials I looked at, I could not figure out how to do a knit stitch.  After about a week of trying and failing, I put the yarn and needles away.

For some reason, I kept that yarn and those needles.  Packed them away when we moved from our apartment into our house.  They sat unused on a shelf for at least two years.  In 2004, after dropping out of grad school a couple of years before, I was happily employed.  My work schedule was nuts and I often had days off in the middle of the week.  On my days off, I went shopping, mostly at Barnes & Noble.    It was there that I saw Debbie Stoller’s Stitch ‘n Bitch book.  I picked it up, flipped through it, and put it right back down.  I didn’t want to spend the money on the book since I had failed so spectacularly before.  The following week, I went right back to B&N and bought the book.

I pulled the yarn and needles down from the shelf.  Like before, I got the long tail cast on down immediately.  After a couple of tries, I figured out the knit stitch.  I knit swatch after swatch of garter stitch.  I taught myself how to purl.  I knit swatches of stockinette, 1×1 rib, 2×2 rib, seed stitch.  Nothing but swatches.  Finally, I got up the nerve to buy yarn and needles for a project.  I bought some Rowan yarn and a big pair of needles.  I knit a striped scarf in garter stitch.  Each color went on for 10 rows.  I finished it in about a week.  After that I bought some Debbie Bliss cashmerino something or another and knit a scarf  in 2×2 rib.

I’m not sure what the next project after those first two scarves was.  All I know is that I was in love with knitting.