Knitting History 1

January 23rd 2006
I don't remember learning to knit, but I do know what the first thing I knit was: a kettle holder in a thick maroon wool which must have been ravelled back from an earlier item. My brother and I learned at the same time and entered into a race to finish. His problem was that he kept knitting two together without meaning to, so the width of the piece narrowed as he went on. We definitely called these pieces "kettle holders", no doubt because we did in fact still boil the kettle on the open hearth, so they were functional items.
Much less fun was my second attempt: a single mitt in pale lemon three-ply wool, knitted in my junior class over the course of a long winter, possibly one afternoon a week. They really knew something about pace and objectives in those days. By the end of the winter that mitt was a very grim colour indeed, but at least I didn't have to do the matching pair.