Knit and crochet blog week- starting out

As mentioned last week I am going to take part in knit and crochet blog week this week.

The general idea is that there is a list of topics, (one for each day of the week, plus a wildcard) and everyone who fancies it can blog about those topics.

The topic for today is starting out, about why and how you started knitting, so ready for a trip into the past?

Actually I think it is a pretty common story, I learnt to knit when I was waaaaaay younger (maybe 6? Not sure, can't remember). My Grandma taught me and I used to make squares from brightly coloured acrylic when I visited. The squares were meant to become a teddy bear blanket but I am not sure if I ever made enough, I suspect not. I also can't remember if I could just knit or knit and purl.

Ready for a confession? I am actually bicraftual. Zoooooooom forwards about fifteen years. I was on my uni work placement and a colleague was telling me about how they were learning to crochet, sounds like fun thinks I. I got a how to book, some cheapy yarn and a couple of hooks and crocheted away for a while. I think it took about six months for me to get bored of the lack of patterns (this was before I knew about Ravelry), the use of a lot of yarn and for uni work to take over and the crochet got mostly abandoned.

Relearning to knit happened when I was bored and unemployed between two years of uni in 2008. I saw an advert for the innocent big knit campaign, and thought "I used to be able to do that!" about knitting. Also my sister had learnt to knit when it became trendy and I figured if she could do it so could I :P (she will complain about that if she reads this). I got some knitting supplies from Wilkos and used Google to reteach me how to knit and set about making tiny hats.

When the hats were done I wanted to make a jumper as a Christmas present, but couldn't find the right yarn so ended up making socks instead, mostly because they were meant to be difficult and "how hard can they be?". I managed to knit the entire first pair of socks inside out, so learning off the internet is not always the best way, still came out wearable but the toe grafting looked a bit odd.

My sister introduced me to Ravelry at some point and I blame that for my hobby turning into an obsession :D.

Learning to dye and spin (and to knit more complicated things) are ongoing processes that I have already blogged a bit about, and will talk about in the future so will not do those again here.

Hmmm, looking at that banner has hammered home what the date actually is, am going to run off in a panic and get some work done now, back tomorrow.