FFS - famous first socks
Hi there,
this newsletter will combine a few snippets I let fall in earlier writings or somewhere on my website with a topic which is very important to me and worth a few thoughts.
Laying next to me are these socks.
Yes, they are well past their prime: They are pilling, the toe decreases opened up, there are dog hairs on them I can’t get rid off and discolouration and they are worn out and won’t stay on my feet. Why do I keep them?
Well, these are my famous first socks. If you didn’t hear their story before, here it is again (feel free to skip it if you can’t hear it again :-)): I learned to knit in school in 1993. After practicing a few stitch patterns we were given a project: The beginners were supposed to knit a scarf while pupils who had learned to knit before then should make socks. I was an easily bored and very lazy teenager back then but clever as well. I thought that I’d never manage to knit a scarf long enough for my taste without getting seriously bored but I quickly saw the advantages of knitting socks:
When you reached the halfway point of the project, you’d already have a finished sock (a so-called HO but I learned that expression more than 30 years later).
You could identify different parts, so you could see milestones: leg, heel, foot, toe.
It was much less knitting than a scarf.
So I decided I wanted to knit socks despite being a beginning knitter. I asked my teacher and she was convinced by my sampler that I could do it and I was allowed to knit socks as my very first project. My mother and I went and bought a set of double pointed needles (dpns) and this wonderful purple (my very favourite colour back then, I was in my purple period :-)) Regia sock yarn. I had fun knitting these and I didn’t find it difficult. Our teacher only explained the next step if all of us had finished the last step. I remember that I borrowed another set of needles from my mother to start my second sock because not everyone was finished with the leg the I was. It was the time of 50g balls and my mother is a knitter too so that wasn’t a problem.
The rest is history. I loved knitting the socks, they fitted well and I wore them all the time for at least 10 years which is reflected in their condition. I got the best grade for them as well (which was a rare thing for me). A new sock knitter was born and for the next 10 years I almost exclusively knitted socks. (All for me by the way: If I put all that effort in, then I wanted to keep and wear the results.)
My first project included things which are regarded as difficult by many knitters: Knitting socks, i.e. knitting in the round and doings this with dpns, turning a heel.
Instinctively, I followed a set of guidelines which still inform my knitting. My first impulse was to say that the reason for this sock-knitting experience was that I didn’t know better back then but that isn’t true. I was a teenager and had encountered many problems before so that I didn’t believe that things would always work out no matter what anymore. I had heard often enough that I wasn’t hard-working, careful or neat enough, especially if it came to crafts and handwriting.
However, here are my guidelines (formulated for knitting but they fit with most things you can do):
* Don’t be afraid, it is only knitting.
* Knit what you want to knit, not what other people think you should knit at your stage of your knitting journey. It is your journey.
* If you want to knit something, you can and will manage it. If it doesn’t look like you wanted it to look like, try again. You can always start again.
* Don’t limit yourself. It is only yarn and needles.
* Look for milestones and break down a bigger project into manageable smaller parts.
* Just start. Even if you don’t understand a particular instruction at first, more often than not it will be clear when you come to that point in your knitting.
* It hasn’t to be perfect. Small imperfections make the finished piece even more wonderful.
Decide what you can live with and make up a missing stitch or just knit two stitches together if there is somehow one stitch missing. Decide what you can’t stand, rip it back or repair a wrongly crossed cable several cm down which takes you longer than knitting it all again (guess how I know) and start over.
* There is always a book or a person to help you along.
Of course, some of these guidelines get easier if you get more experienced but from my example you can see that even as a beginner I followed most of them.
I think it is sad to limit oneself in something which should bring joy and is done not out of necessity but because you want to do it. If you’re happy knitting a selection of patterns, using a selection of techniques and knitting with a selection of well-know yarns (for example), that is great. But if you dream about shawls, socks, jumpers, cardigans, blankets, patterns, yarns….: go for it and just start. You’ll manage.
Around 1999/2000 a friend bought a sweater I liked a lot. It was knitted in cotton yarn and had bell sleeves and rolled cuffs. I didn’t buy one for myself but I had cotton yarn from another project I didn’t like and ripped back. I had never knitted a sweater because that was what my mother did. She knitted all my sweaters when I was a child and teenager and even when I was a student I got sweaters knitted to my exact specifications. I thought that she could knit anything. And though I now know that she had her own pattern in her head and only changed colours and stitch patterns, she made my dream sweaters happen. Back to that sweater of my friend: Since I had just seen my mother knit an Icelandic yoked sweater in one piece from the bottom up, I decided I could knit a copy of my friend’s sweater as there wouldn’t be any sewing which I hated at that time of my life. I started knitting and made the pattern up as I went along: I wanted it wider at the hem (rolled hem which meant no purling too) so I decreased after a bit. I only knew one type of decreases which are very obvious and not the best choice but that didn’t matter to me. I increased again for the bust, knitted the sleeves with glorious bells, put it all together after asking my mother which stitches to knit and which I needed cast off at the underarms and decreased again until I had a suitable number of stitches for the neck. When I was at the yoke/ decreasing stage my mother told me I should have used another decrease but I didn’t want to rip it all back and decided I could live with it. Because it was cotton yarn there are holes at some decrease points but it didn’t matter. I was proud of my first sweater and still am. And I even still wear it.
In the next weeks my very first knitting pattern will be published. The sample was knitted in summer 2017, the pattern was written and edited (of course I use a tech editor) in March 2018, it is being test knitted as we speak and it is going to be published soon. It is a simple colourwork cowl so why did it take me so long? Easy: I was held back because I thought negative thoughts and didn’t apply my knitting guidelines to my designing. (There are two more patterns in the pipeline which didn’t take that long so I might be on a good way.)
If you think your might limit yourself in your designing (or your knitting if you aren’t a designer), please don’t hesitate to ask. I’m sure we can work something out. I was always good at cheering other people on and I really like working with designers to make the patterns for their designs shine. I have room in my editing calendar for new designers and those of you I worked with before, for new and experienced designers, for shy and bold designers…. You’re all welcome :-)
Talk soon,
Frauke x