I first taught H to knit years ago. She wanted to learn, but she was so little. I guess she wanted to as it is what I do, usually while ‘watching’ TV, gotta keep those hands busy. I have been knitting for years. I am not an expert like lots of my friends or like my mother was, but compared to H, I am an expert. That was then though….

Her first knitted item was going to be a scarf for a friend of hers. It was a shark in some bobbly but fine grey, not wool! Each row was an effort. After a year and a bit, it became a cape for one of her friend’s bunnies. Smaller and finished. He liked it, which was so awesome and encouraging.

Next was a pester purchase of some not wool that was light with little flecks of pink for a hat – I think that not yet a hat still exists somewhere. It required that she learn pearl and it was a stretch. The plain rows were faster. She has this weird way of increasing stitches that I can’t work out. Every time she dropped a stitch, it was me to the rescue. Her friends were knitting and making it look easy.

The latest trip to a knitting shop and another pester power purchase, she was on good footing here as I was there with another knitter who might have brought it for her had I not. Actual wool this time. But it turns out now was the time. She has spent hours at a time knitting. She unpulled heaps of it due to her increasing stitches and not thinking an uneven hem for this scarf was at all acceptable.

On her own, she has perfected being in control of pearl and plain, picking up dropped stitiches, and stopped random increases. What most amazes me is that she is experimenting in a way that I would never have thought of. Trying on her own to make a woven effect. She has done a cool thing with taking stitches off the needle onto a safety pin, then knitting them back in later. She is experimenting in ways I never did.

All these gaps were of years. I am sure that there were visual inputs in that time, but the actual knitting events were far apart. Maybe there is something to the idea that learning is a spiral (Jerome Brunner), and as you go round, you meet the same idea as you met before and add to it.