me 'n knitting

About four years ago, when it was becoming all hip again, I decided to take up knitting.

Now, my mom had been a fabulous knitter. (One of the reasons, out of many, that we used to harass her by calling her the white-trash Martha Stewart.) She did all the impressive, complicated stuff: intarsia, cabling, and so forth. And when I was a kid, she taught me to knit a little. This first phase of my knitting career culminated in a bright red sweater I made for my cat Stanley in 10th grade. Unfortunately, soon after I got distracted by other matters, like having sex and minimum wage employment and deciding where to go to college, and knitting fell by the wayside for twenty-five years.

By the time 2004 rolled around, I'd forgotten everything I'd ever known and my mom was gone, so I had to re-learn from books, like Knitting for Dummies and Stitch 'n Bitch. I spent time on knitting websites and made pilgrimages to Windsor Button Shop for $10 skeins of fancy-shmancy yarn. I experimented with felting and pompoms. It was fun. I made all my female friends and co-workers trendy scarves for Christmas, and everyone was impressed and pleased.

Then I hit a snag. I couldn't figure out how to sew pieces of knitting together, not even with a goddamn ...for Dummies book. And my mom was ::sob:: not around to help (which in retrospect was how the cat sweater came together in 1978). Not being able to progress beyond projects that could be made in a single piece was discouraging. I stopped the knitting.

Just the last few days, I've been dragging out my knitting books again, and thinking about maybe, just maybe...

Anyone want a scarf?

xoxo