I think it’s pretty clear by now that my favorite type of knitting is stranded colorwork. (The dictionary on this device does not like the word “colorwork”. If I hold out long enough, maybe it will learn it.)
I gravitated to colorwork pretty early, but understand that I didn’t learn to knit until well into my thirties. I have been crocheting for all of my life, however. And I enjoy crocheting. If you want to create a 3D item, or if you need to get something out that is large, or if you want to get something out quickly, crochet with a medium needle and a sport weight yarn is a stellar way to go. Many people around the world have or have had crocheted afghans that I whipped up. And the fact that it goes more quickly in no way diminishes their beauty and the amount of love that is put into it.
It wasn’t until I began to teach crochet as an extracurricular activity at one of the schools I worked for that I began to think about knitting seriously. I had dabbled before, but had never gained ground. At the end of the year, my students said that they wanted to learn to knit. To be honest, it was a frequent refrain in the class, and my response was always that I didn’t have enough experience to teach it.
That summer, I spent time with Erik’s grandmother, Grammer, who sat me down and gave me a crash course in knitting. When I returned to school, I said to the kids, “Okay. Here we go. We’re all going to learn together!” It went really well. I was able to keep at least slightly ahead of my students. At least enough to know when I needed to learn how to fix a specific problem.
And they made progress. It was the last class of the day, and so they were squirrelly and tired, but we all learned and came back for more.
At one point, I was teaching students how to do a purl stitch. I explained that the knit and the purl stitch give you same result, it just depends on what side you are looking at it from. That whenever they made a knit stitch, if they turned the fabric they were making over, they would see a purl stitch.
One of the students said, “Oh, so l don’t need to learn to purl.”
I asked her what she meant. So she explained that if knit and purl fundamentally was the same stitch then she didn’t need to learn how to do it. This hadn’t occurred to me. She figured that it was something of a plot, and if she needed to purl, she could just turn the fabric over and knit the stitch.
The project she was working on was in a garter stitch so she really didn’t need to know how to purl at that time. I decided not to challenge her. She had worked really hard to get where she was already. And, one of the most important things I learned in college was that people learn things when they are ready. She was clearly not ready.
A few weeks later Grammer sent Erik and I both knitted sweaters. Mine was a beautiful cabled cardigan in forest green. I brought it in to class as a “show and tell”. My students thought it was as beautiful as I did. My agent of anti-purl looked at it and said, “I want to make this!” I thought about reminding her that she didn’t want to learn to purl. But, instead I smiled and said, “Well, you will have to learn to purl.”
She said, still staring at the sweater, “Okay.” And that was that.
There are many morals that can be taken from this little moment, but for me, it was seeing in real-time how easy it could be to not waste energy pushing my agenda off on someone else. She was respectful; she just didn’t see how learning something new at that moment benefited her. I probably could have drug her kicking and screaming towards creating a purl stitch, but instead I allowed the passage of time, her growing comfort with the art, and the lure of something just outside her comfort level move her forward. It’s a trap to think that if we don’t push or prod or wheedle someone along, they won’t ever get there. And how does creating an environment where someone hates what they are doing or worse has to defend a prior level of ignorance make things better?
So, the advice I give myself when someone says, “Oh, I can’t do that,” (and I hear this frequently when I’m knitting stranded colorwork) is to allow for the fact that maybe they can’t. It’s not that they aren’t talented. It just may be that they aren’t ready. And let me tell you, when somebody says to me, “Show me how you do that,” I will be all over it.
The Anti-Knitting League 