This post is going to serve as an introductory post, but I’m also writing this for nostalgia’s sake. I’m going to tell everyone how I got started knitting.

First, my mother. My mother was born in India, and she learned to knit when she was eight or nine years old. When she was older (late teen’s to early 20’s), she taught knitting classes, and was somewhat famous for her classes and her work in her community. She knit until she got married and moved to the US in the 1980’s. Then, the knitting stopped. She had my dad, and she had my sister, and then she had me, and she didn’t have time for knitting.

She picked up her needles again when I was in eight grade and dusters became all the rage – my sister and I wanted one, and she’d sniff at every one my sister and I’d show her and scoff “I can knit something better than this!” Finally, she did. She knit a purplish-grey duster that now sits on the highest shelf of my sister’s closet. After the duster, she took on a few more projects: a yellow seed-stitch sweater, a gorgeous blue cabled sweater (made for your’s truly), and a few sweaters for Christmas gifts for my sister’s two best friends from high school. After that, the knitting weened off again, and she had some unfinished projects, or just lots of yarn and a pattern that never got started to go with it.

The knitting started up again with great fervor last summer when we moved to Atlanta and I was bored out of my mind and desperately needed something to occupy my mind and my hands. I found a yarn store about 15 minutes away from us, and off we went. My sister picked out a Filatura di Crosa pattern for my mom, and she’s finished at least eight or nine (if not more) complicated patterns since then, in my sister’s and my apartment, cars, hotel rooms, and our house in Michigan.

Now, my turn. My first attempt at knitting occurred when I was about 10 years old. An old friend randomly gave me three skeins of acrylic yarn and a pair of knitting needles in box that once held a soap making kit for my birthday. My mother taught me how to knit, and I made myself a headband to keep my small head warm that cold Michigan winter. I promptly forgot about the headband and the knitting.

I became interested in knitting again in middle school when my mom started again, but I didn’t make an effort to learn until my sophomore year of high school when a friend told me she knit too. I asked her to teach me, and we’d make tentative plans, but nothing ever happened. Finally, one day I wasn’t feeling well enough to go to school and I rummaged through my mother’s knitting things and pulled out a pair of size sevens and a ball of worsted weight navy blue yarn and shoved it in my mother’s face and demanded she teach me. She spent about twenty minutes teaching me how to cast on, knit, and purl, and that’s all it took.

I spent a week or two just knitting blocks, making sure I got out of the habit of accidentally slipping stitches or creating yarn overs, and then I started knitting scarves, lots and lots of scarves. They were all very simple, either garter, stockinette, or ribbed, and I handed them off to my friends as gifts, as they were all made of inexpensive acrylic bought from Meijer’s. I made a bag out of Lion Brand Homespun, three-stranded and garter stitch, which I still bring out on occasion. I stopped knitting at the end of my junior year, it stopped exciting me. I guess all that garter and stockinette and ribbing got boring, and I didn’t feel challenged or that I was learning and gaining anything.

My sister and I moved to Atlanta last July, and my parents stayed with us for a few months to set us up. Not knowing where anything was and not having and friends got old fast, and my mom realized I desperately needed something to consume myself with. We went off to the LYS and I started on a pair of fingerless gloves, and then I started on My First Sweater, a Tahki Stacey Charles raglan sweater. I finished the front and back very quickly, but the decreasing on the sleeves confused me, and it ended up taking me nine months and lot of my mother’s help to finish it. If you do the math, that means I finished that sweater about two weeks ago.

Since then, I’ve started a bag made out of chunky pink cotton, and a lacy top from Vogue Knitting’s 2006 Holiday edition. The top is coming along beautifully, and I plan on finishing it by the end of next week. I have plenty of projects lined up, especially lots of things from Interweave Knits.