Exorcising Miss Armstrong

Miss Armstrong is the person who taught me how to knit, when I was seven and new in town. I was delivered to her class by the principal halfway through the school year, with the words "She's skipped a year, so she might be a bit slow." Off to a flying start, then, with suspicion and resentment on both sides, and things never really got any better. I remember her as small, blond, and sharp in all dimensions; my mother, with whom I checked this memory, says "She was a pretty little thing, but she shouldn't have been teaching little ones".

When it came time for our first needlework class, I didn't have any knitting to work on; and when I confessed that actually, I didn't know how to knit, Miss Armstrong was incredulous and angry in a "what's wrong with you?!?" sort of way. So she taught me how to knit, not in a manner which suggested this might ever be a fun thing to do -- and right-handed to boot, which for a very left-handed child didn't make things any easier. My first project, a purple square, finished as a lopsided purple rhomboid of sorts with a large hole in the middle. Our term project was to knit a toy; I spent weeks poring over magazine pictures of lovely and utterly unattainable knitted toys before resorting to my mother in tears at 6pm on the night before the project was due. We made a pink square, rolled it up and stuffed it, sewed two eyes on it and called it a worm (my mother still has it somewhere).

All of which goes some way towards explaining why I've always associated knitting with failure and incompetence on my part: "Oh, I can't knit". I made one oversized and never-worn fisherman's sweater when I was 14 and everyone was knitting, a baby jersey when I was pregnant with JJ and awash in hormones... and that's about it. Until now. Thanks to a lot of crocheting, Ravelry and the world of knit blogs, it has slowly dawned on me that this knitting business is worth another try. I realised it would be fun to experiment with a different kind of fabric to the one made by crochet, and even more fun to try combining both in the same project. It would be cool to learn some new stuff: circular needles? cabling? socks? lace? Mmm.

So, here is the first thing I have knit in 30 years without thinking "thank god I never have to do that again":


It's not perfect -- my measurement skills leave something to be desired so the two front panels came out slightly different lengths and they don't match up properly-- but there are no holes in it and all the bits fit together more or less as they should. I have (re)taught myself how to cast on with one needle, knit, purl, increase (two different ways) and decrease, cast off, pick up stitches to knit an edging and make buttonholes. I consider that a very satisfying learning curve (she said, smugly). Back to crochet next because I have some yarn left over and I really want to make the Boteh scarf, but consider me a convert.