A shameless Allman Brothers reference, and another guest post by the fabulous TrishC!
(Unsurprisingly, though, I couldn’t help throwing in a couple of editorial comments along the way. TH)
Tess and I were chatting one day about how we got started knitting, and we discovered some strange coincidences.
At first, it didn’t seem as if there could be much in common between us. I got started with crocheting when Tess, if she existed at all, was in diapers, back when hippies were busy with everything granny square. She’s a Midwesterner, and I’m bicoastal (born in the old South, brought up in southern California.) I’m a Deadhead. She’s the only person I know who has actually seen Flock of Seagulls in person. The differences go on and on.
But, oddly, about the same time in the mid-1980′s, we both started knitting. Okay, maybe that doesn’t sound all that peculiar. Lots of us discovered knitting at that time. Heck, Vogue Knitting began republishing then. But stay with me. It gets weirder. 
We found out that we both began with this little booklet, an oldie from the 50′s, from the Coats and Clarks company.
Here’s my own copy, bought around 1969 in Lakeside, California, at an honest-to-gosh general store on the main street downtown. I learned to crochet from it. It’s survived all these years even though I seem to have used it as a coaster at some point. I don’t know when and where Tess bought hers. But (cue the Twilight Zone theme) we both used it at around the same time to learn to knit.
(Mine came from the local discount store in the Sunset Plaza — I can’t remember what the name of the store used to be, although it’s a Wal-mart now, and it used to be a Shopko in my teens – but this was way before either of those. It was also where I got most of my easy-care yarn.)
It gets stranger. We also both decided to advance our knitting craft by using another book.
Yep. That’s right. We both used the old Reader’s Digest Guide to Needlework. What are the chances? Sure, it’s a classic, and in my opinion still a great resource, but given how many general needlework books there are out there, isn’t it odd to have both used this one?
(I still think this is a great book, too. Mine was an Xmas gift from my older brother, Joe, when I was about 10 or 11 or so. In an unrelated incident, he also took me to get my cat Morgan exactly 15 years ago today, in Texas, as an early birthday present. A heartfelt "thank you" for both of these things, Joe.)
And we got started in the 80′s. I mean, this is spooky, right? Très Jung.
(and one more spooky thing: we both started strictly with crochet, and crocheted for some time before being inspired to learn to knit.)
Synchronicities aside, the reason I started knitting was because I happened to be reading a women’s magazine one day, and there they were – really cute sweaters for really cute little kids.
I knitted these because my sister had, a few years earlier, given birth to two of the cutest little people ever. I made these for her annual Christmas photo. Here they are, in all their glory.
As far as I know, Tess never knitted these – but if she has, turn up the volume on the TZ theme song…
(I didn’t knit these, but I did decide I had to learn to knit after seeing many knit vs. crocheted sweaters in women’s magazines!)
Now they’re late-twenty-somethings. I can’t quite get used to it. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still really cute, but you can’t get them to pose for Christmas photos in matching sweaters anymore.
My DH and I got a scanner recently that can handle slides – remember slides, Tess? Nah. Probably not. They were an ancient way of taking photographs before digital photography was invented. Anyway, I ran across this slide of me, a late-twenty-something myself, holding these my first sweaters:
I still can’t believe I did that. They came out better than I expected. I was a knitter from that day forward. I never did have any fashion sense, though. Don’t you just dig those enormous plastic glasses frames? I think I still have those, come to think of it. I use them for painting and working with power tools. Best dang safety glasses ever. But there’s no way around it – they’re hideous now, and they were back then, too.
I went on to knit a few more sweaters for the cutest kids ever. Here’s my nephew in a Norwegian pullover making sure it will keep him warm in the snow: 
And here’s my niece, who evidently decided she could make the same determination without getting snow on her midsection:
And, well, it’s just snowballed from there.
(ha, ha, I get it. snowballed!)
I kept at it. My stash grew in size until it could eat New York. I have yarns in my stash that date from this era, in fact. I’m seldom more than a few meters from something I’m knitting.
I’ve hidden knitting to sneak it past people controlling what gets brought into some venue (I ask you, is a half-finished sock going to bother anything at the film society screening in the art museum?) I’ve made lists of my projects during long, dull meetings where it would be too obvious to work on the actual knitting itself.
There isn’t a sign of addiction that I don’t show. But it all started with two books back a few decades ago, apparently in sync with at least one other knitter.
Tess, if we find out there are more of us, does that mean we were all kidnapped by the same aliens?
Cheers,
Trish C
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