I teach knitting classes
Most popular:
• specialized sock-heel workshops
• plaited cast-on class for socks, hats, and coffee cup cozies
• certified Knit Companion trainer
I travel to book readings and signings.
You can schedule a class or event on my Shoppe page.
If you’re reading this post on 9/11/2011 then I’m probably wandering somewhere near Ground Zero while your eyes are skimming the page. I had a book signing event yesterday but I wrote this days and weeks ago and set it to automatically post at 8am today. I didn’t want to miss today even if I’m not at my computer.
• • •
10 years ago, at 8am, the world was a different place. My students were different people. I was different too.
Prior to 9/11 I’d been through a couple of things that left post-traumatic scars—things I don’t really want to go into on a blog—so 9/11 wasn’t unfamiliar psychological territory to me. But it was unfamiliar to so, so many others who were also far too close to those buildings.
For those of you who are new to my blog or my story, I wasn’t far away at Stuyvesant (though you’d think they were much closer than they were, the way the papers went on about them). But I also wasn’t in the buildings themselves, skittering down the stairs while the firemen went up, up, up.
I was at a small, unimposing, city high school—The High School for Leadership and Public Service—about a half city block south of the South Tower. The only school closer to the Towers was our next-door neighbor, The School for Economics and Finance. You probably never heard of either of our schools. That’s because our schools were home to “city kids” (that’s secret code for “mostly Black and Hispanic kids”). But you should have heard of our school. It was amazing. Amazing administrators. Amazing staff. Amazing kids.
Our kids beat Stuyvesant at Moot Court.
I’m not braggin’.
I’m just sayin’…
Anyway.
We were there.
• • •
I wrote about our 9/11 experience on a blog long before there were blogs. I also wrote about it irregularly here, on or around 9/11 anniversaries.
They also made this video
I also have a bunch of posts I started but never published. It’s hard to write about 9/11. Actually, that’s not true. It’s hard to write meaningfully about the day. But I’ll try.
• • •
I was asked by a fellow blogger, Julie at Happy Catholic, if I’d want to add a 9/11 post to a portal she’s a part of and I said yes (it’s not like this is new terrain for me). Then she said, “maybe something about forgiveness” and that stopped me.
Forgiveness?
For 9/11?
You’re kidding, right?
It’s not that I don’t want to… it’s just that I don’t really feel like that’s part of my purview. I didn’t lose anyone close to me. The Towers didn’t fall on me (nearby, sure, but I was in Battery Park when they came down. Other teachers were still in our school building). I have no influence on others’ abilities to forgive nor was I a target that needs to dole out forgiveness. At least, not directly.
But then I thought, no. I actually do have something to say about forgiveness. It relates to my post after the USA Today article came out. I was peeved, really ticked, at the way people flame on blogs and make casually cruel comments on otherwise serious writing—or at least good writing about a serious topic. I was mostly, however, seething at the “oh, get over it” crowd. These are the people who say things like:
as if it’s a choice. As if any emotional reaction is a choice.
There’s a forgiveness gene or maybe an empathy gene that seems to have been switched off somewhere around when Gordon Gecko first reared his ugly head. That’s when I first noticed it, anyway. I can’t guarantee anyone felt more civil before that, but they sure as heck acted more civilly before that. Me? I’d like to be surrounded by a little more acting every once in awhile. I don’t much care how folks feel—and you can’t really change that anyway—but we can expect certain behaviors from civil society (or at least Miss Manners thinks so).
I’m pleasantly impressed with the site GoodReads and the way it lets you establish tone in book groups. Once those things are out in the open, once expectations are stated, folks seem to have little difficulty living up to them. Maybe it’s that GoodReads is full of real names and thus we aren’t all just faceless ciphers. Dunno, but I do know that it’s a relief to visit a site that’s got some class.
So this is my 9/11 point—in those sleepwalking days following the attacks, New York was a subdued place, but a timidly hopeful one. I recall taking a lot of time to talk to neighbors on the stoop (since we had no school to go back to at first), walk through Prospect Park, play with my son, and talk to everyone from my school I could get a hold of—reliving the day, identifying where everyone was, making sure we were all still here. All safe. All okay.
Because the best we could hope for was okay.
And we all wanted the country to be okay too. I know my friends and I spoke a lot about how the aftermath could be turned into a positive—
But that isn’t what happened.
None of that happened.
At best, we were encouraged to go shopping.
No sense of “we’re all in this together†lasted past the occasional “We’re all New Yorkers Now†bumper stickers. No one (with the possible and very local exception of Rudy Giuliani) worked to draw people together to support one another, to see ourselves in the faces of those who lost loved ones, to acknowledge any sense of “there but for the Grace of God…†And to me, that’s a sadly missed opportunity. We had a chance to get our empathy gene back… and we blew it.
The last ten years have found our country more divided than we have been since the Gilded Age—divided politically as well as economically. I hear people screaming. I hear lots of people judging. I hear lots of vitriol and nastiness and pain.
But I never hear it from real people.
The actual people I know—whether we agree or disagree politically—are all kind, gentle, generous folks who are trying hard to make a good life for their families against ridiculous economic and societal odds. Everyone I know works day and night to make sure their kids are safe, well-educated, well-fed, and as decently socialized as you can expect to be in our world. I don’t know anyone who’s pro-abortion any more than I know someone who’s anti-choice. Those aren’t our words. Those are words that have been put in our mouths through sound bites and media machines.
And, lest I come off as another judge-y voice, I know media people too—and they’re working just as hard to be good and make things better as we are. Maybe even harder.
I think that’s the important thing. None of these people are bad. Or evil. Or unworthy of my sympathy, empathy, or time. Even if we don’t agree on everything, these people I know?—these are good people.
Pogo said, rather famously, “We have met the enemy and he is us.â€
There’s a “dead hand†that pushes us along, riling folks up about conspiracies that don’t exist, evil that isn’t out there, and threats that aren’t even at the level of pipe dreams. But they get repeated in the echo chamber that is our 24/7 news environment. And we hear. And as we hear, we believe. And then it filters down, this casual cruelty we ingest from the variously polarized news venues. It filters down until we believe it’s okay
and the more we judge, the more we believe we’re right, the louder we get, the less we listen.
I never learned anything from talking loudly (though, G-d knows, I’ve tried).
So that’s my forgiveness message to everyone and to myself too (because I’ve been as guilty as the next). Let’s give everyone a pass, shall we? Let’s assume the best—that we’re all doing the best we can with the odds stacked against us. Let’s find a way to be a little more generous of spirit and understanding and, yes, forgiving of one another’s choices.
To those who are still grieving 9/11 and it’s aftermath, I give you my prayers for peace. You are not harpies. You are not weak. You are you, and you are doing the best you can. To those who are grieving about, well, anything at all, I hope beyond hope that the people who surround you give you the space and grace you need to heal. It is a process; G-d only knows how long it will take. It’s not up to us to judge.
At least, it shouldn’t be.
I can always imagine…
Video made by Avalon Arts Studio?
There is something particularly special about the smell of New York when the weather is warm. The garbage left out on the street leaves a patina that some try to wash away with a hose but to little effect. Instead the smell is diminished and altered slightly, but enough lingers to lodge in your sense memory.
Or at least it did in mine.
Add to that the smell of fresh fruit in the corner market bins and the general smells of morning (and fish if you’re lucky enough to be on th Lower East side) and you have a pantheon of smells unlike anything anywhere else.
Which is what I had this morning.
Perhaps it was unwise to schedule my first major book signing event on the day before the ten year anniversary of the 9/11attacks. Perhaps not. Either way, I didn’t sleep much. Why? Two things. First, my sister found on Craig’s List an apartment with a room you could rent. Awesome, right? And really reasonable. And downtown, amidst the police protecting all of us.
Lots and lots of police.
Second, knowing my bus would have to leave through the tunnel tomorrow. On 9/11 I scrupulously avoided all bridges and tunnels (rather sanely, I thought) and now, new terrorist threats announced, here I am, about to do the stupid…or at least the cautiosly tense.
Regardless, there wasn’t much sleep.
But now in the drift morning light, I sit at La Pain Quotidien
with a fabulously snarky New York waiter, about to eat gluten-free oatmeal and drink a pot of Earl Grey–I already had awesome coffee on the walk up.
My coffee place.
And then? Then I go to the SoHo Gallery of Digital Art, meet up with Ehren Ziegler of ChopBardChopBard podcast and set up for our day of bookish fun!
For reasons that will continue to elude me, videos wont embed at the Madame Defarge site, so… I’ll put them here.
Without further ado, Sections one, two, and three of What Would Madame Defarge Knit?
I made a BSJ (that’s Baby Surprise Jacket if you haven’t made one yet) for my little niece.
It was definitely a surprise, mostly because of how odd it looked. Here, let me show you.
See? Giant blob o yarn.
Well, once I finished I decided to take pictures of the folding process.
First, the primordial blob.
Now, at the top you’ll see button holes. That’s one side of the front. You can see a sleeve trying to form there, too, pointing up and to the left slightly.
And there, down at the bottom of this next pic you can see the same.
Okay, overview pic. You can see button holes right and left edges, but see how nicely turned the upper right and left corners are? That’s because those are actually the bottom of the button bands–actually the bottom of the sweater. Remember, for me, it was a blob. This is me figuring out what the heck I’m looking at, so I didn’t rotate any pix. Yours may look equally odd.
So, since the sleeves were trying to assert themselves at the top of the button hole edges and had to be opposite the nicely rounded bottom edges (I did an attached I-cord all the way around)
Now I put my hands at the top middle and the bottom middle (between the nicely rounded edges and between the burgeoning sleeves) and I lifted the sweater to fold it in half. Top of this picture you can again see button holes and now you can clearly see a sleeve pointing north.
I rotated the whole thing, opened it, adjusted those button hole areas to overlap and VOILA! SURPRISE!!!
Now, HOW La Zimmerman figured that out is a mystery. And for me, having that I-cord band to hide the seaming of the shoulders was just spectacular. Howevvah. I’m not a real fan of the garter stitch thing. I like flat. I like sleek. I’m not so much into the bumpy thing.
I mentioned this on the podcast and IMMEDIATELY got these words of warning from Lee:
Heather:
The stockinette BSJ does not work. I made one and it comes out slightly deformed. Remember, garter stitch is square but stockinette stitch is not.
Attached are 3 photos. 1 Stockinette BSJ and 2 regular BSJ’s. You’ll see what I mean.
I’m including her pix below (you can see more of her handiwork at sereneknitter.blogspot.com. See how perfect the first two are? And the third, in stockinette…not so much.
Lesson learned.
Recently I was interviewed for USA Today’s article 10 years later, those who left NYC look back. During the course of the interview I was struck by the kindness and generosity of the three people with whom I made contact at the news organization—the reporter, the videographer/photographer, and the web video editor. Seriously smart, funny, kind people who didn’t fit the casual stereotype of biased media in any regard. They were generous of spirit and hard working, devoted to communicating what had happened to New York and New Yorkers after the September 11th attacks as honestly as possible—this article being the first foray into more 9/11 coverage, as I understand it.
Now, I’m not unused to seeing ridiculous responses from folks who trawl the interwebs—I did, after all, see a blog response where a man used one of my 16 year old students’ written memories of 9/11 as “proof” positive that it was a bomb and not planes that brought the Towers down. Why? Because this boy said the “explosion” was loud. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that was it. That was the proof. I posit that you have to be grasping at straws to (a) have to depend on a kid for your main backup to an international conspiracy, and (b) to ignore the enormous bulk of evidence against you (including, btw, that in the same passage the kid talks about the planes).
All that is my way of saying I know there are stupid, lazy thinkers out there. Got it. Fine.
I find it sad, however, that the immediate responses to the USAToday piece on people who (clearly sadly) left a city they loved after the attacks were comments amounting to nothing more than ideological snark. What motivated us to leave the City encompasses a breadth of emotional responses to grief, fear, and family concerns. Our decisions were not easy. The process was fraught for all of us. We all have days where we wonder… what if. All of that is there in the article/video. So what was the first posted response to the text?
Another fluff article from USA Today that missed obvious facts! The state of New York lost two electoral votes from population loss as a whole in the census for a number of reasons. The facts are economic decay, run away taxes and the uncertainty of 911 . …no surprises here, another liberal state in decline!*
Yep. That was it. It goes downhill from there.
taken by student Jennifer Rivera as we evaculated
I suppose in our current state of crazed polarization, it’s to be expected that a human-interest piece gets reduced to more political shoving and name calling, using labels rather than thoughts. The ones I expected to see did in fact show up by the end of the first page of replies:
And NO one else felt anything? Did you have to be there to feel it? Too bad, then don’t go back and let it go. everyone else has.
And that’s the one I wanted to share with you.
Remember back when Gabrielle Giffords (God Bless her for showing up at Congress yesterday!) was shot just a bit down the street from our place in Tucson and I posted about wanting a Mom Brigade? I’m still hoping for that. I’m not sure when we, as a country, lost our empathy gene, but I’m starting to wonder if we ever had one. There’s no question that our country is young—an adolescent, if you will—and, as with teenagers, we think we know more than we do (and prove it often) and kind of shove everyone around because we have no sense of time or history. We are not, for example, France. Or Germany. Or Italy. Or Greece. Or China. We have not been in our “skin” as it were, for hundreds (thousands!) of years like some other countries that have stood the test of time. We are a bunch of loud kids in the back of the room, making it hard for anyone else to get anything important done.
America as a country often responds like a teenager, selfishly and frequently without understanding the ramifications of what we do—sometimes that leads to enormous generosity and courage. Sometimes we bully. As though watching it all in a Petri dish, some days I watch the most thoughtful, compassionate, and logical of my former students try to engage the least-able of my former students on Facebook when one posts something sadly ignorant about politics or the environment**. The more thoughtful get bullied by a barrage of bullhooey and I weep because I didn’t do my job.
To my mind, my job was not to get my kids to “agree” with me. It was to help them write well, cite their sources, and think through a topic logically. I couldn’t have cared less whether they were right, left, center, up, or down. I just wanted them to think…and cite their sources. And spell better than me. And…
And lest you think I’m a country-hater bent on the destruction
of all that is American—sorry. Not. I don’t buy that
anyone has a corner on the Patriotism market.
I Love the country. Love. It.
I just want to see it behave itself.
So yeah, I’m still hoping for the Mom Brigade—an army of adults in the country who are capable of realizing that there are many ways to respond emotionally to… anything, who don’t judge others based on pious Puritanical models*** or statements that begin with “well I never would have done…” because you don’t know. You simply don’t know. You can’t know. I hope you never have to know.
Of COURSE everyone in the country felt something. I know my family in Tucson had what I, at least, would call PTSD for a long while after the attacks—mostly because they couldn’t contact my sister or me for much of that morning, but yeah. Everyone was attacked that day.
But, you gotta admit, it’s different when someone’s trying to drop a building on YOUR head. When planes and loud noises make you jump—for years.
But it’s this line that really makes me squirm—even more than the political screeds:
Too bad, then don’t go back and let it go. everyone else has.
Anyone ever lost a loved one? Anyone had to deal with the rest of the world—friends even—telling you to “move on” and “get over it” and “time to get back to normal” after you’ve lost a parent…or a child? I’ve watched this happen. It’s ugly. It’s just mean. And it isn’t helpful—at all. My point is this, online or in person—who am I to tell someone who’s grieving to get over it? Who are any of us to put a clock on emotions? Why do we feel that we have the right to judge other’s emotional responses to events? Where does that come from?
I actually banned the word “should” from my classroom
one year because it upset kids so much (“you should do
your homework on the train,” could easily start an argument
when said to a kid who rode a bike—there’s something about
the holier-than-thou “should” that rankles).
I loved that when we got married, my husband and I were told that, traditionally speaking, we were “bride and groom” for a year. Why? Because, lets be honest, it takes at least that long to get used to marriage. We’d lived together before the ceremony. We’d known each other for over eight years. I couldn’t have been more in love with the man (still am). Didn’t matter. Married is different than not-married. It just is. Just like a terrorist attack that takes down two, hundred-plus-story buildings on top of your town is different from, say, having a really bad day. And finding the new “normal” takes time—different amounts of time for different people. Who are we to judge?
I sure hope this is all a phase we’re going through and that somehow we’ll be able to pull a new normal out of the wreckage. All I can see happening since 9/11/01 is that we’ve become more polarized and less civil—at least online and in the voting booth. In my daily life, I’ve not found this to be the case at all. Even folks who I disagree with politically are just flat out wonderful people. So where does this come from?
You got me? But wiser heads than mine in the Mom Brigade need to help me come up with a way to respond to this judgmental piety that comes flowing so easily off of fingertips and out of the mouths of pundits. I used to think “just don’t read it and it’ll go away.” But it hasn’t. It wont.
Maybe if we can just last a few hundred more years…
• • •
*Actually, I’ve said before and I’ll continue to say, NYC was the only place I’ve lived where I didn’t mind paying taxes. Boy do you see your tax dollars at work—free concerts, museums, great public transportation, cops and firemen who know you. All the stuff I miss is the stuff that would probably categorize it as a “liberal” state. So… Just sayin’…
**This goes along with the incompetent rating themselves as competent and vice versa.
***Checkout the book Why Don’t Students Like School? (brain & learning) by Daniel Willingham
Shop Indie Bookstores
and
David Eagleman’s Incognito on the latest brain research on this—fascinating!
Shop Indie Bookstores
Settling in over here on the Mid-Atlantic Seaboard (or thereabouts) hasn’t been as much of a shock as you might think.
And why has it been so easy?
Because of knitters. Knitters, fiberfolk, friends of yore, and book-stuff.
I’ve already visited (and fallen in love with) two of my local yarn stores (Uniquities nearby in Vienna, and Fiber Space via Metro in Old Town Alexandria), I’ve seen good friends who I left behind in NYC who’ve also moved down to these here parts, I’ve knitted, and I’ve started making plans for more book-related events. So, you know, I’m keeping busy.
I’m also knitting more. Knitting, swatching, making plans for teaching—all that good stuff.
Iffin you’re interested in having me come to your LYS, teach, sign books, hang out, have a beer—you just let me know. And it’ll only get easier for me to meet up (a) during the school year and (b) when we find a babysitter.
I know many of you feel my pain.
I am not a fast knitter.
Seriously, I’m not. Yes I knit Continental, which is supposed to be faster, but as far as I can tell this makes me a more secure knitter (in that I can knit and purl without looking at my hands).
I realized I wasn’t a fast knitter when Wendy test knitted the Madame Defarge Stole for me and went faster than I could get instructions to her.
She’s FAST.
Drops shawl, which I am not knitting quickly
From time to time I try to focus on speed—when knitting something simple—and I suppose I speed up a bit, but mostly I just knit as I knit. I can switch back and forth between Continental and British and (on the knit stitches at least) I really don’t see much speed difference. Sometimes I wonder if it’s because I was originally taught British. Mostly I don’t wonder at all. While it would be nice to go faster, most of the time I don’t mind. Right now, though, while I’m busy busy busy and designing a lot more than I used to, it would sure be nice to go faster.
What do you do?
Have you sped up?
Do you have useful links?
I’m really curious to find out how other knitters have dealt with this…or IF you have.
Well, we landed in Virginia a week ago and it’s been non-stop kids and getting used to living in a state with laws.
Seriously.
Here I need a passport and my actual social security card to get a driver’s license. In Arizona I think you just have to be able to pronounce your name. And you also should be breathing.
Mostly.
Right now, however, it’s nearly 3am and I’m covered in mosquito bites.
Yes, I’ve been putting spray on.
I’ve found some promising new ones, and I’ve learned a couple of tricks, the best of which is to put anti-perspirant on the bites.
It’s working.
Which is why I’m thinking my forearm—which is so itchy it’s painful—is maybe not so much a mosquito bite as it is a reaction to something. I don’t know what, though gluten’s always a likely target. Aspartame started giving me hives on my wrists, so I’ve been avoiding that. This is new, though. Really hot heat hasn’t worked, icy coldness isn’t working, and I’m soooo tired.
However, it’s given me a little peace and quiet to be able to catch you up.
I’ve been able to knit. FINALLY. It’s been miserable driving and driving and driving and not-knitting. So, once the DH was back in my life he volunteered to drive and lo, I knit an Ancient Mariner Watch Cap from the Madame Defarge pattern book (you can click a link in the sidebar to get one). And on that note, we’ve been doing pretty well. Folks seem to like the book so far and those who’ve knitted the patterns seem to be quite happy. I’ll post some pix below.
Other knitting has included Tristan socks for my BiL (also from WWMDfK?); a baby kimono for my NEW NEICE!, pattern from the first Mason Dixon book; two raglan hoodies (for the new babies in my life); swatches for a new sweater and skirt design; two shawls (both for Thing 2–he fell in love with two in Dixie’s shop in Eau Claire), and I know there’s something else, but I’m yawning too much to remember.
Instead I’ll regale you with some pix while I try to figure out what to do with my forearm again.
A little Defarginess for you:
Thing 1’s Gluten-free birthday cake designed and executed by Thing 2 
If you used to visit here regularly, you may be wondering, “What in the sam hill has happened to that woman?!”
Well, in a nutshell:
The thing that kept getting pushed aside was blogging.
To try to amend that, however, I’m going to be audio-blogging from the road. I’ve started the pre-trip blogging and those files–plus all the new ones from the road, can be seen below. It’ll just have to do until I get to the new digs.
I’ll be testing ways to legitimately blog from the road, but my breath isn’t held. It was disastrous last time. Maybe technology has caught up to me by now.
Fingers crossed!
Along with the “How to Crochet” page I put up a bit ago—with the best video tutorials I found—I wanted to add Continental and British knitting tutorial videos to the mix.
Before I go any further, and because I know folks have opinions about these things, I want to put out there that I knit both British and Continental. My Grandmother taught me British when I was little, and later when I picked the craft back up as an adult I re-taught myself Continental. (Well, not just Continental, but Combination Knitting, just like Annie Modesitt (who has free online knitting classes)… only I didn’t write a book about it.[1])
All of that is a long way of saying I have no personal bias. I knit Continental most of the time, but I think that’s because I spent so many of my non-knitting years neck deep in crochet and thus holding the yarn with my left hand feels comfortable. If I do color work I knit both ways at the same time, and there are some needle and yarn sizes that simply require me to knit British.
So.
What the heck are Continental and British?
Continental Knitting has you hold your working yarn in your left hand (and generally that means you’re manipulating the yarn with your left and the needle with your right). British has you hold your working yarn in your right hand (and generally that means you’re manipulating the yarn and one needle with your right). These, however, are not hard and fast rules. I’ve seen Continental knitters carry the yarn in their left but manipulate it with their right. It’s pretty cool. And ditto that in reverse for British.
All that is a long way of saying: if you’re doing something that looks like knitting and find that you’re making some kind of fabric and aren’t twisting your stitches, then you’re doing just fine. Unless someone can show you how you’re twisting something up, don’t let them tell you you’re doing it “wrong.”
Now, on with it!
Knitting is the process of making a series of slip knots but instead of making them in a chain (crochet) you’re making a loop and catching each loop on a needle. All those stitches on the needle are “live” and if you pull them off the needle and tug the yarn they’ll all rip out. Prrrrrrrrrrrrt!
Lesson?
Don’t pull your stitches off the needle unless you know what you’re doing.
There are two ways to look at knitted fabric, the flat side and the bumpy side. If you make a KNIT stitch, you’ll have the “flat” side facing you. This will look like “regular knitting” that you might see in a standard sweater you buy at a store.
If you turn that fabric over, you’ll see that the back side of the knit stitches is bumpy. That means you need to learn how to knit the flat “front” side and the bumpy “back” side. Those stitches are called “knit” (flat) and “purl” (bumpy).
Every move in knitting begins with either a knit stitch or a purl stitch. So, once you master these two stitches there is NOTHING you cannot do. Interweave just came out with this nifty little (free) eBook on how to knit, too. NAYY*
I’m a visual learner, so I’ve dug around to find the clearest videos I could. PLEASE feel free to put links to other good videos into the comments on this page
UPDATE: In fact, drop down to the comment from Alix F. She found better videos!
The Knit Stitch
The Purl Stitch
If you want flat knitting (not bumpy) then you will knit one row (often called the “right side”) then turn your knitting and purl back down to where you started (often called the “wrong” or “back side”). This is called “Stockinette Stitch.”
If you want bumpy knitting, use the knit stitch no matter which side you’re on. This is called “Garter Stitch.”
All of that is well and good, but you can’t practice if you can’t cast-on—that’s how you get the yarn on the needle to begin with. There are MANY ways to cast-on. I’ve linked here to two. The first video is the most common as it gives you a solid, generally stretchy cast-on row. The second requires less fiddling with the yarn initially, but it can make for a very loose cast-on which may look a bit baggy when you’re done.
Long Tail Cast-on
Backwards Loop Cast-on
And when you’re done, you’ll need to get the blasted thing off of your needle! For that, you need a bind off.
And now?
You can knit!
The only other things you need are to know how to increase and decrease. I found a page with very good tutorials on that, so I’ll just link you to them. And if the videos I’ve posted here don’t float your boat, please don’t despair. There have to be a metric ton of tutorials and videos out there. Poke around. I know you’ll find one that works for you. And don’t be embarrassed to go to your local yarn store. Buy some cheap yarn and needles, then plop yourself down and have them teach you. They will.
[1] I wrote a book about something else entirely.
*No Affiliation Yada Yada
MamaO is Heather Ordover, author, designer, mother and knitter... not necessarily in that order. You can get posts from this blog sent directly to your inbox by signing up below, Follow her on Twitter and Like her on Facebook if you're feeling friendly-like.
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