Mary-Helen asks: “How hard is knitting, really?” I agree with a lot of what she says, even as someone who teaches the occasional knitting class. When I teach, one of the biggest messages I try to get across to my students is This is easy. You can do this. It seems that a lot of women* I meet don’t rate themselves very highly. They think that because I’m knitting socks, I must be cleverer or more talented than they are. This is bullshit. It’s all in the level of self-confidence. For better or worse, when I try to pick up a new skill, I usually start with the expectation that I’m going to be good at it. Otherwise why bother? And people were knitting long before there were knitting books and podcasts and Ravelry and all that other junk. It’s just sticks and string. How hard can that be? If you can follow directions and pay attention for more than ten minutes at a time, you can learn it.
* Possibly Sexist Digression: Sadly, it really does seem to be mostly women that have this attitude. I’ve never once heard a guy – whether a knitter or not – express a belief that knitting is hard. They may think it’s girly or beneath them, but they’d never say they weren’t smart enough to do it. Guys seem to figure that if other people have worked it out, they can too. WOMEN NEED TO ADOPT THIS ATTITUDE.
