Fun With Knitting

Knowing how to make cloth is an almost magical skill, but one that had eluded me for a long time. My grandmothers each tried to teach me the mysteries of knitting and crochet when I was a kid, but it always seemed like I produced a knotted mess instead of neat rows of stitches.

Because I was such a fiasco with yarn, I had given up on learning to knit, until Joseph and I started talking about learning useful doom-based survival skills. We got some yarn and some crochet hooks, studied a book called Knitting With Balls, and watched numerous tutorials online.

Joseph showed more aptitude from the beginning.

Look, here he's made a square!

My first few attempts came out looking like Crackspider had been at the yarn.

After taking apart and re-trying a few of these interesting creations, I managed to produce this:

It's still a little like a Crackspider weaving, but you can see some stitches in it that resemble actual stitches.

Eventually I had Joseph demonstrate to me exactly how he was making it work. I needed a real-time, three-dimensional demonstration because I have trouble visualizing things in three-d and I also have some task-ordering difficulties (whee!). I had to get a kinesthetic sense of where the yarn and the crochet hook should be, and in what order things should move.

After a few demonstrations and a lot of practice, I managed to do this:

Check it out--not only is that a square with mostly good stitches, but I even managed to change the direction of the stitching a few times! Eventually I should be able to make actual items out of yarn.