I originally learned to knit one winter during college. I had plans to make my then-boyfriend an Icelandic wool intarsia sweater; nothing like an easy, non-ambitious first knitting project, eh?
Ah, the utter ridiculousness of young love -- I still have the half-finished sweater stashed away somewhere, 18 yrs. later, but the boyfriend is loooong gone! After the break-up, I abandoned knitting completely for many years before I discovered the wonderful world of CD and knitting wool soakers, longies, etc. for my kids and picked it up back up with a vengeance around 5 yrs. ago. Then, after Sophie's birth, I got overwhelmed and busy and burned out again and took a 3 yr. break and have only recently started back up for a third time, lol (will this be the charm?) I'm pretty much completely self-taught.
I think you'll love knitting!
After you get the basic stitches down (knit and purl), you'll find there's an endless variety of things to do with them, and I really find the rhythm and the feel of the yarn deeply relaxing and satisfying. It's a great stress-reliever for me, even when I have to frog things. The only thing I need to be careful of when knitting while pg is that in the 2nd half of pg, I tend to get carpal tunnel syndrome and knitting only makes it worse, unfortunately. So tip from me: if your fingers start to get numb while knitting along, that's not normal, lol!
![]()
As for how I went about learning, I do own various books for patterns I like and sometimes I get books out of the library and photocopy patterns, too. I also print out visuals from various websites of stitches I use a lot and need to remember. But although I'm a pretty visual learner, I find just looking at a diagram or photo to learn something new really confusing and unhelpful, so when I was first learning to knit, I went into my LYS (local yarn store
) during their "free help" sessions and had someone just sit there with me and show me, over and over again if necessary, whatever I was struggling with. That was invaluable!
However, now that I've gotten even busier and don't usually have time to stop by there when I'm stuck, I rely a lot on the many good knitting videos you can find online, at youtube and the like. That's how I finally learned to knit two toe-up socks simultaneously on magic loop. I would have been soooo lost had I tried teaching myself that from diagrams alone! But the video allowed me to figure it out in a matter of minutes. I've figured out that when it comes to kinesthetic things, I'm a "hands-on", rather than visual learner.
Let us know how it goes; I'd be happy to be your learning-to-knit cheering section!
Guin
