Starting out

Today's Knitting and Crochet Blog Week topic is "Starting out":
How and when did you begin knitting/crocheting?

OK.... I learnt to knit in the 1950s, when I was about seven or eight, I think.  I had a doll's dress (or maybe it was my sister's) that was probably crocheted, in a green kind of silky thread, and it had hole in it, and I asked my mother to teach me to knit so that I could mend it.  Of course, I never did manage to mend it by knitting, but instead of explaining that it wouldn't work, she cunningly taught me to knit first.   I think that I made a hat out of a rectangle of garter stitch that was then folded in half and then sewn up down the sides.  I sort of remember that it was red.   The blurry photo shows me wearing a similar hat, though I'm not sure if it was one I knitted.

I don't remember knitting anything much after that until I was a teenager, when my sister and I both started knitting jumpers for ourselves - until then my mother did a lot of knitting for both of us.  In the sixties, knitting started to get exciting,  with designers such as Kaffe Fassett and Susan Duckworth starting out and publishing patterns.  I plan to write about  one of the jumpers we knitted then, later in the week.