I started knitting when I was in third grade, and I learned from a friend's mom. I mass-produced garter-stitch scarfs for anyone who wanted one for years. Then, a knitting/quilting store opened just around the corner from my house when I was in high school. I took just about every lesson they offered. My first class: lace knitting, where I learned increases, decreases, and other basics. Having no knowledge of what good yarn was, prior to the class I just picked up what I had lying around in the basement, which happened to be an orange acrylic yarn. At the time I bought it, the color looked to me more like an autumn, pumpkin orange, but in hind-sight it was more of a hunting-vest annoying orange. But the important thing is that I learned useful skills.
My intro to circular knitting was a class on mittens. This time, I spared no expense and bought the softest, prettiest yarn in the store. The mittens I made in that class - the very first pair I ever made - I still wear today, they are my favorite pair of mittens ever.
I also took a class on sweaters from the neck down. I picked out a Lamb's Pride shade of light green. Problem: at the time, I am a high school student with extremely limited income, and making sweaters is expensive!!! Something I liked so much about the idea of knitting is that you can avoid the costs one would associate with buying one from the store, but this is not the case. Fortunately, my mom was a fan of my choice of hobby, and helped me buy the yarn. I never finished that sweater, sadly, because I ran out of yarn and money. It's been about three years, and maybe soon I'll finish that sweater.
I loved taking knitting classes, and for anyone interested in starting to knit, I strongly recommend it. There are other ways to learn, and each has its pros and cons, which I will explain:
1. Self-learning: There are a ton of excellent resources out there for learning by yourself, including videos and detailed articles (and blogs, too!). But what I find from people who have tried this is that it can be frustrating. If you're not doing something quite right, it's difficult to figure out exactly where you went wrong. And the real tragedy of this is that I feel like the people who go at it this way first get discouraged and quit relatively quickly. But if you're a determined individual, it can be a cheap (or free) alternative, especially if you have limited means and no one else to teach you.
2. Learn from a friend: Most knitters I know (including myself) are very willing to pass on our knowledge to anyone who wants it, and (unless you have some horrible friends) they probably wont charge you. But learning can be a time-consuming activity, and since your friend is the one doing you the favor, you might find yourself going significantly out of your way to learn. Also, even if your friend might be very willing to teach you, they might not be the best at it.
3. Taking lessons: Most knitting stores offer lessons, and I think this is a great resource. The people who teach these classes are at least supposed to know what they're doing, and probably have a lot of experience teaching others. Yes, it costs money, but in my experience it's not extraordinary. If you've tried learning by yourself, or from a friend, and just can't seem to get a hang of it, I implore you to explore this option.
Another great advantage to taking classes is the social aspect. I love knitting in groups - it's a lot better than sitting in your house knitting alone for hours on end. Also, you'd be surprised what you can learn even from knitters at or below your own skill level.
My explorations with recycle-knitting came from the knitting teacher at the store where I took lessons. She once told me about her college room mate who would buy some yarn, knit a sweater, then take it apart just to knit it all over again. "What???" you might be yelling right now and wondering why in the world one would go through all the trouble of knitting an entire sweater just to take it all apart and start over. Well, as college students, she understandably didn't have much money, and yarn for a sweater is expensive, and for her it wasn't about the product, but the process that mattered.
So when I was in my favorite thrift store one day, I thought 'If one could take apart a sweater they made, I could take apart a sweater someone else made!' Some of these sweaters were ugly, but the yarn they were made out of were sometimes nice. I could take this sweater that no one wants, and make it into something someone would want.
Up-cycling. I had heard the term before, but now it had a whole new meaning as I sought to combine this concept with one of my favorite hobbies.
Growing up, my family had this nice, sturdy, wood dining room table. It was actually an heirloom of sorts, coming from my mother's family. However, decades of wear, including vandalism from crayons and markers my siblings and I had inflicted upon it, had reduced this once beautiful table into a useless artifact of the past. Its place was now in storage. We had no real use for it, but my mother did not want to part with it. My sister, needing a coffee table, saw the potential in this table. Yes, it was unsightly, but it was made out of something of great quality. Once sanded, refinished, and the legs cut in half, it was once again a beautiful, functional, useful table. It was once again wanted.
I see great beauty in this process. Turning unwanted things into wanted things, and using no extra resources. I get excited about it. The way I see it, it's the way of the future.
I think home-made things have gotten a bad reputation, and maybe rightly so. The craft world is filled with way too many useless things, which turns the response to the idea of hand-crafted from "cool, something unique" to "Oh great, Aunt Maybel made me ANOTHER bejewled lanyard..." I'd like to turn to DIY projects as a way to be sustainable, not to make a lot of stuff that (although you may have put a lot of love into) is relatively useless. And I don't mean "useless" as an offensive term, but literally, something that probably will not get used. It's creating more "stuff" and using more resources, as opposed to creating unique, useful things that REDUCES the amount of "stuff" on the earth. Just think about the amount of junk that starts out from a factory in China, get shipped to a Dollar Store, sits on the shelf for months and then gets put in a land fill. Way. Too. Much. Stuff.
In summary, I implore you to get creative and help reduce the clutter on the planet.
