Yesterday was my very first blogiversary...and I totally missed it! To celebrate, I thought I'd republish my very first post about how I learned to knit. Enjoy ;0)
{Hello World, October 3rd, 2005}My mother was one of 24 chidren. Yup! No really! My grand-parents were farmers in rural Quebec and being good Catholics in the 1930s and '40s had a child every year they could. My grand-father passed away when I was 3, but my grand-mother lived to be 84 years old.
She spent the long Quebec winters in Rimouski with one of my uncles and his wife but in the summer she would pack her bags, her knitting needles and her yarn and travel down the St-Lawrence River to Montreal where she would visit with all her children and grand-children and great-grand-children. She would spend about a week at each of her childrens' homes and knit mittens and socks and slippers for everyone in that family and then moved on.
During one of those visits, she taught me to "tricoter a l'endroit" (knit) and "tricoter a l'envers" (purl) with some scrap yarns. (Did I mention she was french? In fact my whole family is...I'm the anomaly. More on that later, but now back to my knitting debut. ) My grandma would watch me knit and every once in a while, she would have to put down her mittens in progress and try to figure out where I went wrong. Somehow, I always ended up with too many stitches (which is weird because now I always seem to be loosing stitches!). Anyway, I would make a little square, get bored and go draw or play house instead.
My grandmother passed when I was a teen and it wasn't until my early twenties that I got the knitting bug from a
Martha Stewart Baby magazine. I got myself some needles and cotton yarn and knit the garter stitch baby sweater. It was pretty much a bunch of rectangles seamed together into a buttonless cardigan but it looked pretty good. I made one for my nephew and put the needles away for another couple of years. I was working full-time and finishing my bachelor's degree on a full-time basis as well and just didn't have time for knitting. Textbooks occupied my commuting time.
I got married last year and moved to a new house in the suburbs. One of the implications was a 1h30 minute train ride each way to and from work and since I graduated and don't have any more required reading...I picked up one of
Debbie Bliss' learn to knit books and the rest is history. The addiction began. I was encouraged by all the knitting blogs out there and now that I am at home on maternity leave with my 3 month old son, I have both the time to knit and a growing model for all those very cute and very quick knit baby sweaters and booties.
So expect to see a lot of baby knits 'cause he's always growing out of something...
Cheers!
{The continuation}Of course Julian is now 15 months old and history is about to repeat itself as I am expecting my second child...so expect to see more baby knits in the future too ;0)
One of the things that really solidified my knitting career was that the week after our wedding, Stephen's job took him to Indiannapolis Mondays through Thursdays for 6 months! Here I was in a new house on an undeveloped street (basically, the woods!) far, far away from anything without cable or satellite which left me incredibly bored in the evenings!
Knitting really helped me get through this time. It was fun. It busied my commute and my evenings. And I keep such a good memory of that time even though I was seperated from my newlywed. All those nights spent bundled up on Stephen's side of the bed, wearing his woolies, listening to AM talk radio on our clock radio and trying to figure out different knitting techniques while I waited for our nightly call.
That's when knitting became more than a past-time for me. It became a part of who I am. So I'll always be a little grateful for those long lonely months ;0)
