For my first post, I am going to take you on a journey, from novice knitter to budding designer. You are probably wondering from the title how screwdrivers come into this, well hold tight. I will take you through the origin of my knitting story, and how I started back up again after a hiatus. I will also talk to you about designers who inspired me and finally about my first original design. If you want to know more, keep reading!
The beginnings & Screwdrivers
The story starts in 2010 when I was an early teenager. While cleaning out the house of my late Great-Auntie, I stumbled upon the biggest collection of yarn, cross-stitch memorabilia and crafty things I had ever seen. All of this awoke the crafty gremlin within me and when my dad informed me he would give all of this away I was heart broken. So, we made a deal, if i learned to knit before the end of the week I could keep all of the yarn, the needles and the knitting machine (I’ll talk more about that in later posts).The only catch was I wasn’t allowed to use any of the stuff to practise. I imagine my dad thought this would discourage me and lead me to give up on the idea and dad could get rid of all the stuff from his house. Oh how he was wrong.
This is where the screwdrivers come in, I found 2 similar sized Philips head screwdrivers and some twine from my dad’s collection of tools and got to work. I watched countless tutorials and spent hours on Wiki how and managed to knit… something? I will never forget the day I woke my dad up with my attempted knitting (I was aiming for a square but it turned out to be more of a… monstrosity) and proudly proclaimed that I can now keep all of the yarn. My dad was less than pleased.
Victory was short lived
My victory spurred me on to get better at knitting and eventually I was knitting at a consistent tension. I didn’t end up making too much at the time, a couple of bracelets, a square or two and one third of a scarf. I knitted for about a year on and off but I was getting to the age where I wanted to fit in and spend time with friends and no one knitted so I stopped.
Mental health and blankets
The story picks up again in my late teens, where I am at university, doing a placement in a high pressure sales job. This ended up really impacting existing mental health issues I had so I took some time off to help cope with that and in that time I picked knitting back up. I found knitting really helped me be present and helped my mental state massively. And I started to want more of a challenge than just blankets and scarves.
I had found a free pattern for a crewneck pullover and started knitting that. From this point I started to design colour charts in excel (I may release them here if you guys want me to) to jazz up the simple jumpers I was creating. I was getting confident with this one pattern and decided I wanted to expand my skills and buy some new patterns, then lockdown hit.
UK Lockdown
When lockdown hit, I found myself with so much time on my hands, so instead of finding free patterns, I brought a load of patterns (many of which I still haven’t gotten around to knitting, but that's for 2021 smikle to deal with). I started to knit faster, and more consistently and I gained so much confidence in my ability to take on harder and harder challenges. This exposed me to designers like Jessie Mae (all hail) Ivy and Autumn, Ponder and Ply etc. and seeing these trendy and fun designs, I realised I could do it too! I had some ideas in my head for ages that I never thought I would be able to do, and I spent hours reading about how to design garments and eventually just bit the bullet and started! This is how SmikleGoesKnitting was born, though still in its infancy, I see great things for the future of SGK.
Final thoughts
It’s been a long and eventful 10 years since I first discovered the joys of hand knitting. I’m so grateful it is in my life and has allowed me to pursue something I am so passionate about.
This journey has led me where I am today having the confidence to start my own youtube channel design my own garments, one of which will be released next year (God is a knitter dress, Spring 2021) and another which should follow soon after.
Thank you for taking the time to read this lengthy post, I hope it helped instil confidence in you and your knitting abilities. If I can start off knitting on screwdrivers and be here, you can do anything!
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