Sometime this year, I’ll have been knitting for about seventeen years. (I don’t remember at what time of year I actually started, but I’m relatively sure I started knitting before Dan and I started dating, so that’s where I’m basing my timeline.) It’s been that long, but only in the past five or six have I really started to consider myself any kind of skilled knitter. Only in the past few years have I learned to make more than a thousand hats.
I suppose it technically started with The Shawl, which I no longer have but gifted to a friend when I grew out of it stylistically, but that shawl was the first time I bought more than one skein of yarn for a project. Until that point, it had felt so daunting to spend so much money on a single project, until I just didn’t have it in me to knit another hat. I wanted something a little different, a little nicer.
The Shawl was the key, but socks were the whole doorway. As soon as I began to knit socks, it was all over.
Well, that’s not quite true. It wasn’t over until that sweet, sweet bout of tendinitis in 2021. Between gift knitting at the end of 2020 and beginning the Folklore cardigan that is still, three years later, unfinished (but close!!), my right wrist really took a beating that winter. It still isn’t fully recovered, and the best bet is for me to always wear a wrist brace when I’m knitting now to prevent a new flare up—but I digress.
When I learned to knit socks, it was like Aladdin came through my window and hauled me away on a magic carpet—A whole new world, if you will. I was suddenly learning about heel flaps, gussets, heel turns. I tried patterns with lace, patterns toe up or cuff down, different types of heels. Don’t even get me going on self-striping yarn. Yr girl cannot resist a good self-striping yarn set. (Give it a Lord of the Rings theme and you might as well just have a direct connection to my bank account.)
If you couldn’t tell, I fucking love knitting. (And Lord of the Rings.)
Shortly before Finn was born (maybe right after I had gotten pregnant), I knit my first sweater, which I’m currently wearing to type this up. While socks are funny shapes that look complicated, once you get the hang of them, they’re old hat, especially when you find the techniques you prefer the most. (Personally: Toe up, fish lips kiss heel.) By the time I knit this first sweater, I’d made, well, a lot of socks, for a lot of people. They were my go-to gift for several years. So once again I was craving something new, something that I felt I could learn from.
Enter: The Sweater.
The Shawl was the key; socks were the doorway; but The Sweater was the library where I’d get the most comfortable, knowledgeable with my craft.
After The Sweater, it was a baby sweater. Another sweater for myself. A sweater for my mom. A sweater for a friend—which hasn’t been finished because I resent its part in the aforementioned tendinitis. This devil of a sweater was knit two or three times over the course of a month in a Christmas attempt, and now it languishes in a tote bag, waiting for the day I come back to it. (I have made it no promises.)
And then, the tendinitis interlude of 2021. For long months, I didn’t knit, and for a while I worried I wouldn’t knit again. Maybe it was just time to hang up the hobby. Find something else. In that time, I started art journaling, which has also become a major love of mine (and which I’ve written about for Strawberry Moon Magazine issue five). But I’ll be damned if I give up knitting, apparently, because as I delve deeper and deeper into my Hobbit Era (which, let’s be real, is just how I want to live at this point), I’m realizing that knitting is one of those hobbies that needs to stay. It was one of my first slow hobbies, along with baking. I refuse to let it die!
And so we come back to the present, where I knit with a wrist brace to stave off the pain and maintain the crafty habit that’s been with me for just over half of my life. Where I can sit on the couch for hours at a time, audiobook in my ears, knitting away at my perfect birthday sweater before the end of this month. I’ve never knit myself a birthday sweater, and this year I managed to remember the idea early enough to begin. It’s been such a pleasurable experience that I’ll likely even finish it before my birthday actually arrives, which is perfect. I am getting so much joy from the project, and as I work on it I continue thinking about my Hobbit Era, my pursuit of a slow life as I get older, and all I’ve learned in my time as a knitter. I know what I like and what I don’t like. I know what matters to me and what doesn’t.
And I know you’ll have to pry these knitting needles from my cold dead hands, dammit.
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