Everyone has their own story ... You have yours, I have mine

And with a nod in Jane Siberry's direction, today mine happens to be about how I started knitting.

I learned how to knit when I was in primary school, about six or seven years old. I learned a bit from my Mum, who is also a knitter. (As an aside, a relative of my Dad's once saw a familiar looking woman on a bus, but wasn't sure it was my Mum until she started knitting.)

Being a bookish child, I learned some more from a Ladybird book

My first project was a green garter stitch snake, which probably started life as a scarf. It had holes in it, an an inexplicable bulge along one side where I kept increasing stitches somehow, but without doing yarn overs.

So I knitted for a while, and even learned how to do intarsia, and entrelac, which I have completely forgotten now. My pride and joy was my jumper, knitted with two strands of yarn held together. Mum and the woman at the yarn shop thought my colour selection was dubious, but it looked fantastic when it was done.

A few things combined to make me stop knitting in my teens. Firstly, there was 80's fashion. It cannot be coincidence that most of my 80's fashion jumpers wound up as UFO's. Then here was the teenage thing, and not wanting to be just like my Mum, and going to high school and suddenly having homework. But most of all - I hated sewing up (something else I learned from my Mum). All the patterns were knitted in the flat and none of my books thought to mention knitting in the round.

It wasn't until I was in my thirties that I picked up my needles again and started knitting, as therapy. I was being bullied by my manager at the time, and I needed something to help me deal with the stress. So I knitted this coat that was a series of rectangles, and a couple of other things that I never wore, but they were useful garments nevertheless. This time, though, the world of knitting had caught up with me and I learned some nifty ways to avoid sewing up, such as knitting in the round and the three needle bind off. And being older and somewhat battle scarred, I had the courage to start treating patterns as a set of guidelines, not the law.

This time, knitting stayed with me.