by Lucy Edington

Created on: July 06, 2009

My paternal grandmother used to be a prolific knitter. As a mother of three, it was a necessity - school jumpers were needed and the cheapest option was to make them herself. Knitting never used to be as expensive a pastime as it is now, my Grandmother is shocked how much yarn costs these days. She was brought up on a farm in the north of Scotland in a time when crafting skills were handed down the generations. Unfortunately, because she is no longer 'forced' to knit things, she has stopped; but I was lucky enough to be taught by her while my siblings were young enough to warrant small quick examples of her handiwork.

I was about seven when she put a pair of cool, straight metal needles into my hands and showed me how to fashion a knit stitch. The first thing I knitted was a circular mess with a hole in the middle that was supposed to be a square. I managed to 'knit the tail' and drop stitches in many places. 'Ah me!' my Grandmother exclaimed in her Peterhead lilt 'wit you been daein' tae it?!'. This swiftly became a lesson in casting off my work.

My next attempt went a little better; I knitted a short scarf that had two colours in it, in alternating bands. As I was pinching leftover yarn, it ended up being made of a yellow Double Knit and a slightly thicker mottled brown, but it suited the strange pom-pom man who ended up wearing it. It was a wavy scarf because although I had learned not to drop stitches so often, I still had a tendency to mysteriously make some.

I had been shown how to purl but I found it unwieldy so did not practice much. The knit stitch was soothing but kind of monotonous. My mother does not knit and I lived many miles away from my Grandmother, so without access to regular tutelage (and yarn!) my enthusiasm for the craft fizzled out.

Fast forward about twenty years to the 2006 World Cup, and I was faced with a dilemma: what the dickens was I supposed to do while my boyfriend watched wall-to-wall footie? I did not want to be off in another room all the time, but I also had no interest in football. Reading would be interrupted time and again by the fact that he could not help but talk to the players on the screen or turn the sound up. But I loved this man and wanted to be able to relax on my own living room sofa and keep him company, but still stay sane. So I hit upon the idea that I would take up knitting again, and duly bought some cheap acrylic yarn and plastic 7mm needles from my local Poundstretchers.

This time

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