Created By Artsygal

When choosing something to knit my biggest criteria seems not to be the finished item, but rather how interesting it will be to knit. I find myself getting bored easily and so I tend to choose patterns that have some sort of elements that will hold my attention for the entire time it takes to knit them.

Yesterday however I knit this.

A simple square of 25 stitches and 50 rows, in garter. It's a swatch for the Mermaid Jacket which caught my eye the very first time I saw it. The jacket itself has all kinds of interesting shaping and striping going on, but it's knit entirely in garter stitch.

Knitting this swatch reminded me of the last time I was knitting garter stitch squares. Believe it or not, that was back in 1986! I had just moved to London, England and my school actually had a knitting class! Once a week all 14 of us 5th graders headed into the school dining room where we knit squares up to sew together into blankets to donate to a homeless shelter. It was my favorite class of all. Just like knitting groups I've been to as an adult, we'd sit in little groups, chatting as we knitted and helped each other out when weird things happened like suddenly having too many or too few stitches. My grandmother had taught me to knit a couple of years earlier but it was here, with a group of friends that I became a Knitter.

I bought my first knitting book that year, paid for with a bag full of change I'd saved up from my 50 pence a day allowance (which I still have somewhere in a box!) and taught myself to rib, cable and do some very basic lacey patterns. Without anyone to tell me that these techniques were supposed to be difficult, I just jumped right into them, and even did a bit of self designed fair isle! I cast on my first sweater later that year, which I never finished but I've had something or the other on the needles ever since. Sometimes I wonder if without that class I would have become as obsessed a Knitter as I am today, or if I would have been one of those millions of people out there who just sorta knows how to knit and used to do that once upon a time.

Myself and 4 of the girls of my very first knitting group at my 11th birthday party. Don't you just LOVE the big yellow dress that my grandmother dressed me in? Oh man I HATED that dress! I refused to ever wear it again. I wonder if any of those girls still knit?