I'm Kellie and I am thrilled to be one of the Knitting Professors with Gwen. I am appreciative of her kind introduction and can say all the same good things about her. Frankly, I think of her as a true knitting genius, and love the way she teaches and designs. I look forward to posting here and exploring both the technical and artistic sides of knitting.
By way of introduction, I have been knitting since I was a child, and am almost completely self-taught. After learning the basics in a children's class as a young girl, I found myself fascinated but without known resources, such as shops or books, so I would look at sweaters with a magnifying glass while poking around with a knitting needle. In this way I learned the structure of the knitted fabric first, then how to follow patterns and read about knitting much, much later. The first time I followed a written pattern, I was in my twenties. For all the years in between, I just made it up as I went along. Here is one story that illustrates some of my knitting life: I taught myself to do cables without a cable needle in about 1980, by carefully examining a cabled sweater and discovering that the stitches were knitted in exactly the same way, they were just out of order. So, I took my stitches off the needle and manually reversed them, then knitted them. When I found shops and books and patterns some years later, I thought that cable needles were a brilliant convenience. It has made me smile to see the emergence of cabling without a cable needle as something new and amazing. I can do it both ways, but I really appreciate the help that a cable needle gives. So there you have it-knitting is about choices and there is really no wrong way to knit. In the end though, this learning process has served me well and I look forward to helping you understand your stitches better so you can have absolute confidence about your knitting.
By way of introduction, I have been knitting since I was a child, and am almost completely self-taught. After learning the basics in a children's class as a young girl, I found myself fascinated but without known resources, such as shops or books, so I would look at sweaters with a magnifying glass while poking around with a knitting needle. In this way I learned the structure of the knitted fabric first, then how to follow patterns and read about knitting much, much later. The first time I followed a written pattern, I was in my twenties. For all the years in between, I just made it up as I went along. Here is one story that illustrates some of my knitting life: I taught myself to do cables without a cable needle in about 1980, by carefully examining a cabled sweater and discovering that the stitches were knitted in exactly the same way, they were just out of order. So, I took my stitches off the needle and manually reversed them, then knitted them. When I found shops and books and patterns some years later, I thought that cable needles were a brilliant convenience. It has made me smile to see the emergence of cabling without a cable needle as something new and amazing. I can do it both ways, but I really appreciate the help that a cable needle gives. So there you have it-knitting is about choices and there is really no wrong way to knit. In the end though, this learning process has served me well and I look forward to helping you understand your stitches better so you can have absolute confidence about your knitting.