Knitting

Date of Birth

03/11/2024

Date of Death

19/01/2025

In Which I Discover That Knitting Is Not Just Making Loops With Sticks

As usual, it started with a random great idea.

Handmade Christmas presents.

This features quite heavily in my project history. Apparently every year I temporarily forget that making something yourself requires considerably more effort than clicking Add to Basket.

My granddaughter had just started big school and had a bit of a journey on the bus to get there. Temperatures were dropping. Leg warmers were, inexplicably, back in fashion.

Perfect.

I would knit her a pair for school.

Luckily, this particular Great Idea required almost no financial investment. My mother is an avid crafter and has an entire room pretty much stuffed with fabrics, yarns, needles, threads, hooks and assorted mysterious implements that every serious crafter apparently needs but which I cannot even name.

All I had to do was download a pattern and raid Mum’s stash.

Voilà.

Good to go.

I started in early November.

Christmas was ages away.

This was going to be easy.

It turns out knitting is not as easy as it looks.

Apparently tension is important. More specifically, consistent tension is important.

I discovered this after spending the first several rows having to force the knitting needle through every stitch because I was apparently knitting with the relaxed hand position of someone throttling a burglar.

Eventually I realised I needed to loosen my grip.

Excellent.

Looser stitches were much easier.

Unfortunately, several rows later, I discovered why the word consistent had featured so prominently in everything I’d read about tension.

Looser stitches are also bigger stitches.

I now had half a leg warmer in two distinctly different sizes.

Not a problem.

I would simply rip it out and start again.

Attempt Two

This went much better.

Nice tension. Easy to work with. Ribbing coming along nicely.

Look at me.

I can knit.

Then I stopped and looked at the ribbing.

Something was wrong.

It looked…odd.

Oh, bugger.

At some point I appeared to have switched the knit and purl stitches.

How?

Could I leave it and claim it was intentional?

No.

It looked wrong.

Fine.

Rip it out.

Start again.

Attempt Three

Now, it’s important to understand that I was not rattling through rows like an experienced knitter.

I was sitting there with my tongue between my teeth, wearing a massive concentrated frown, painstakingly producing perhaps three rows an hour.

Consequently, Attempt Three began in December.

But this time I made good progress.

I really did.

In fact, I’d almost finished the first half of the first leg warmer when I noticed something.

A hole.

I picked it up.

Examined it.

Gave the knitting a little stretch to make sure.

The hole got bigger.

Excellent.

I phoned Mum.

“You’ve dropped a stitch.”

She then gave me perfectly sensible instructions for rescuing it.

I thanked her, hung up, and immediately opened YouTube because I had absolutely no idea what any of the words she’d just used actually meant.

YouTube is wonderful.

There are excellent tutorials on almost any subject you can imagine.

What YouTube cannot do is magically make you competent.

I did the thing.

Technically, I believe the stitch was rescued.

Aesthetically, it looked like it had survived major reconstructive surgery.

By now we were about a week from Christmas.

Fine.

New plan.

Her birthday was in January.

I’d buy her something for Christmas and finish the bloody leg warmers for her birthday.

Plenty of time.

They went into the knitting bag to be resumed after Christmas.

Her birthday arrived on 19 January.

The leg warmers did not.

In fact, they never saw the light of day again.

Somewhere at the bottom of my wardrobe there remains one partially completed grey leg warmer, still on its needles, patiently waiting for a second leg warmer that will never exist.

Cause of death: “Fuck this.”

Also known as: harder than it looks.