North Kiddo Knits!

North Kiddo found her way over to my house. We spent an hour together Monday evening knitting.

She learned the long-tail cast-on and how to form a knit stitch, continental style. Well, semi-continental style. She lets go of the needles and wraps the yarn around the right needle with her left hand. She's not left-handed.

She was not enthused about doing a knitted blob for learning. But she has promised some of her little friends scarves, so at least we've got some good learning projects to work on. A common wish-that one doesn't have to practice and that one's first work will be wearable.

She cast on tighter than English ivy and this makes her knitting hard to work. A common rookie mistake. She popped the entire remaining row off the needles at least twice. Once I rescued the stitches and placed them back on the needle. The second time she did it, and did it perfectly.

She was frustrated by her stitches tendency to twist around the needle, so that the ridge from the cast-on wandered. I showed her how to straighten that back up. I said that she just had to tell the knitting to behave itself. She split the yarn a few times-who hasn't?

She had turned one of the two kit skeins into spaghetti. I've since rolled it into a nice center-pull ball. Her bamboo needles are kid-grimy already. The book had some liquid spilled on it and some of the pages are stuck together. We just tore off the bottom edges-no lost words.

She has probably 20-30 stitches on her needles. She was beginning to understand how the fabric would form. We did just two rows before she needed to do something else. I suggested that she work at least one row per day. She was pretty excited when she left and planned to do another row that evening.

I'd say that was a successful session for a nine-year-old learning knitter and a first-time knitting teacher.