Learning to Knit

I'm learning to knit. I was inspired by a blogger who knits and does a lot of other cool things like making soap and bread. I knew a lady in my quilt guild is a knitter and I asked her if she could help me get started.

I don't think I could have figured it out without her patient help. I seemed to me that it would be easy enough, right, just wind some yarn around some needles, learn the shorthand that is used for the patterns and go. But like many things that I have thought looked it easy and really are easy once you get the hang of it, it wasn't quite that easy.

Like riding a bike, that took me a really long to time to learn. My poor Dad! Some kids learn in a day, I've heard. I think after quite awhile Dad decided to give up the first time and bought me training wheels. I don't remember how long it eventually took. But I did learn to ride a bike.

And then there was learning to swim. It looked easy. I went to for lessons at the local high school. They had an excellent program that allowed high school students to teach primary school children. All the new kids were assembled at one end of the pool. We were asked how many already knew how to swim. I raised my hand. We were asked to demonstrate our abilities, one by one, by jumping in and swimming across the pool. My turn came, I jumped in and nearly drowned. After that occasion they stopped taking it for granted that kids who said they knew how to swim actually did.

There was me learning to drive! Oh my! My Dad, a driving instruction class at the high school and private lessons, some how managed to get me a driver's license. The roads were still not exactly safe. Not once, but twice, I turned on to the wrong side of a divided highway, I forgot to put on might lights constantly. I managed to drive around for several years without any accidents by some miracle. I didn't drive for many years and then a very patient friend helped me, really taught me finally to be a safe driver.

And then there was me learning to type.

I don't think I could have ever been a secretary (which I was for many years), if it wasn't for computers. How did they do it in the days of typewriters? It was quite a learning curve for me learning to type. That was what I was thinking about after my first lesson in knitting. I did learn how to type, eventually.

They say that learning something new helps keep your brain healthy. And I don't think knitting could be too dangerous!