When first I began to knit (she ruminated), I was hugely excited by the idea that I could turn a skein of fiber into something I could wear, or look at, or play with, and best of all, be proud of. It’s in my nature to create things, but the idea of doing something with my capable fingers that had been done by other capable fingers for so many hundreds of years was powerful and charming and thrilling to me, all at once. No one in my family knits (although they are still very nice people), so I had to teach myself. So, a few years ago, I bought a little $20 kit from Target which included a DVD and I knitted a yoga bag. It had a few missed stitches and a few pattern deviations, but it was still a functional yoga bag, which had been a few hundred yards of cotton wound into egg-shaped balls by my unskilled fingers a mere week earlier.  

My second knitting purchase was a book, Melissa Falick’s Weekend Knitting. I was sold on it because most of the patterns were very beautiful and somewhat unique and also simple. One of the (very few) things I dislike about the world of knitting is the tendency to design over-bobbled, over-furred, over-color-changing garments, when all I want to make is a black cotton ribbed sweater, and as yet I’m too inexperienced to make a sweater without a pattern. Most of the designs in Falick’s book don’t involve wild & wacky yarns, and have that it’s-all-too-easy simplicity that is demonstrated by athletes like Michael Jordan and Kristi Yamaguchi. Yeah, and that was the first knitting book I’d ever looked at. Oh, dear.  

But this is not a story about my many, many, many mistakes in the first few months of learning to knit. The point I’m coming to is that Falick’s book, since I was in that very impressionable new-knitter phase, convinced me that all knitters have vast, unlimited pots of money to spend on yarn, and that you can only make great garments out of exotic yarns. One of the sweaters in there will run you a minimum of $600, and two baby sweaters are designed with hemp yarn. At the time I was making $7.10 an hour. So I was slightly angry that I’d taken a fancy to a hobby that was clearly so terribly expensive.