I taught my first knitting class today – I really enjoyed it!  Some of them will be working on this Wave and Shell Shawl, others will be needing help with projects already in progress.  These women are already good knitters, they just lack confidence.

I remember when I first got married and moved to Michigan.  On top of being in an altogether different state than where I grew up and away from family and friends, I was separated from my knitting guru!  My Grandmother.  What would I do without her to fix whatever knitting problem I had?  all of those pesky dropped stitches, pattern abbreviations that I didn’t understand, row counting etc. 

I think that is the point where I really took charge of my knitting.  Without her to rely on, I would have to figure it out myself.  I would have to correct my own mistakes and figure out what went wrong.  Rather than blindly following a pattern, I would be forced to try and understand what the designer had in mind and where the directions were leading.  It was then I made the astonishing discovery that knitting was loops within loops!  Holy Cow was that ever a revelation!  Not to mention that the difference between the knit and purl stitch was how these loops were looping through one another.  When this occurred to me, I had been knitting for about five years – you would think I would have figured that out by then.  I didn’t have to – Gram ‘got’ it and she was always available to fix things.

My Grandmother was a good teacher.  In fact, she was a teacher.  As she was fixing my work, she would carefully explain to me what she was doing and why she was doing it.  At that exact moment in time my mind would drift with the thought  ‘yeah, yeah, whatever.  if it happens again, I’ll just hand it to you’

Have you had a knitting light bulb moment?  (that loop thing was my equivalent of discovering America)

so if fixing my own mistakes is the only way I’ll actually learn anything, does that mean that ripping is a good thing?  that I should embrace the frog?