Saturday 15 July 2017

Craft fair and

your resident cat is about to spend the day telling people that it "really isn't difficult" to knit.
Now that is both true and not true.
As a kitten it took me a long time to learn to knit. I was so badly coordinated that even holding one needle in each paw was a challenge. Manipulating the yarn as well was...well, even more of a challenge. 
There were rather a lot of tears, frustration, fury...and a certain determination that I WAS GOING TO LEARN TO KNIT. I have no idea why I wanted to learn to knit. Part of it certainly had to do with the fact that my mother said I would never learn to do it...and my paternal grandmother saying, "Of course you can."
I did it. I remember that blue potholder made out of blanket wool that took me forever to knit - in secret - that I gave my grandmother for Christmas about two years later. It was far from perfect - but she backed it with some fabric and she used it. I loved her even more for that.
So today I will spend some time helping very young kittens do a stitch or two or three on the "knit a row and go" scarves that sit there for people to try. They look dreadful in terms of their actual knitting, different tensions, dropped stitches, gained stitches, odd colours, different yarns...and more. But they are made with a sense of "I did a row of that" and more. Someone should take a photograph and record at least one of them for posterity.
I will talk about knitting - and crochet. I will talk about patterns and people and yarn and where to get help and resources on the internet - and say that nothing beats getting some help from a patient human.
I will say knitting is slower than some crafts, slower even than crochet...after all you are creating the fabric. I will say it is satisfying to design my own and that yes, what I am making is my own design. 
And if there is another small boy standing there who says, "I  wish I could do that" I will tell him he can and about the seven year apprenticeship for men in mediaeval times. 
And I will tell everyone that, "Yes, you can do it too."

2 comments:

Momkatz said...
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Jodiebodie said...

Like many pastimes, knitting can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it. Isn't that the beauty of it though?