cwBlog

Recently I was talking online with a friend who insisted that he was only an average knitter, and that got me thinking about what makes someone an average or an expert knitter. It also ties in with some of the annoyance I've been feeling lately towards some of the knitting lists.

This friend -- whom we'll call Mike, because, well, that's his name -- has knit probably a dozen pairs of socks, including a complicated Aran patterned one, and two sweaters. And not just any sweaters, either: one was Alice Starmore's "Irish Moss," and the other was a colorwork sweater he designed himself with the help of Ann Budd's The Knitter's Handy Book of Sweater Patterns and Ann Feitelson's The Art of Fair Isle Knitting.

I thought of this as I cleaned out an archive of mailing list postings. One of the lists I'm on had an extensive discussion about whether a knitter's first project should be a scarf or a washcloth, or something as terrifyingly challenging as a headband or a hat. And the consensus was that new knitters should stick to garter stitch with no shaping for as long as possible, because otherwise they'll be scared off by all the challenging stuff they might be asked to do. Indeed, some of the posters went so far as to advocate discouraging new knitters from trying socks or sweaters until the new knitters were ready for them.

And there are the regular terrified postings on the Socknitters list as a novice knitter knits her (it's almost always a her) first pair of socks and approaches the heel turn, something her knitting friends have told her is incomprehensibly difficult. And more often than not, the difficulty of the heel turn becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the knitter is so terrified of the heel that she makes silly mistakes out of pure nervousness.

And then I think about Mike, who managed to knit four pairs of socks without fear because nobody told him how hard the heel turn was supposed to be.

Indeed, in the online chat, I pointed out that he had knit an Alice Starmore sweater pattern from start to finish. Many knitters, when faced with a Starmore pattern, would look at the charts and the terse instructions, and run weeping in the other direction. Nobody told Mike that charts were hard, so he didn't have any problem learning how to knit from them. Nobody told him that knitting patterns were supposed to be wordy and friendly, and so he wasn't bothered by the terseness and lack of handholding in the pattern. Of course when he ran into unfamiliar things, he had to look them up, but he expected that -- he had been knitting for less than a year.

His fourth pair of socks was a test-knit for my Elsinore socks -- cables all over the place, a total of six cable panels around the sock in the size he knit. He wasn't the best test knitter, as he was a bit unclear on the concept -- his entire commentary on the pattern was, in essence, "I like the socks a lot. You made a few mistakes in the pattern but I figured out what you meant and knit the right thing anyway."

So what makes Mike not an "average knitter" in my eyes? For one, his willingness to try new things. I see list email from people who have been knitting for 25 years but who are only just now getting the nerve to try socks. How many dishcloths and garter stitch scarfs can one person knit before trying something new just out of sheer boredom? Empirical evidence suggests that there is no upper bound to that number -- but the master knitters challenge themselves.

For another thing, he's not afraid of knitting. (This may have something to do with his day job as a fireman.) So what if the thing he tries doesn't work? He can always rip it out and reknit it -- and he's likely to learn from the mistake. (And to fix others' mistakes.) He's what Elizabeth Zimmermann called a "thinking knitter."

And, if you look at the population of knitting lists and knitting circles, that makes him decidedly above average.