I was trying and failing to steady the skate which I’d hung from the rack on the cieling. The weight of the the boot kept pulling it over. I tightened up the strings now attached to the eyelet hooks, but it wasn’t helping.

The object of this delicate balancing and steadying excercise was to get the left boot pointing forwards with intention, aligned with the left hand, so that our intrepid skater could continue to whoosh her speedy way through the winter night, hands mittened against the cold as they swung forward with exhiliration into The Beyond.

Me and the boot finally came to an understanding with the help of some blue tack and a properly tensioned 3rd support. I eased myself off the window ledge trying not to knock any of the other precariously dangled elements off their moorings, and then stood back and smiled inwardly, for my skater was off: whizzing along the glassy ice, the wind rosying her invisible cheeks and trailing her sky blue scarf out behind her.

The door swung open. I pulled myself together and welcomed the customer who came in.

“I want to make a cardigan. No, I can’t knit yet. I want to learn how to knit and make a cardigan. What do I need?”

“The thing with knitting is that it takes a while to learn the techniques you need for a cardigan. It’s probably better to start off with something straight like a scarf.”

I glanced over at my freshly booted skater on display in the window, who was still boldly dashing forwards, and then back at my now crest-fallen customer – so full of enthusiasm and knitterly hope when she walked in. What was I thinking? Knitting and skating suddenly looked like the complete opposites of each other. But my skater is definitely also a knitter, so there must be a way to make it makes sense. I think it goes like this..

By all means race to the shop to buy wool for your new project and home again to start knitting it. But when you get there, you need to stop with the rushing, for the actual knitting: the casting on, the rows and rows, the knits and the purls, the making one lefts and rights and the knitting twos togethers and the slipping stitch markers, and the counting and the measuring, and the counting again and the dropped stitch fixing, and the undoing and the redoing, and the neckline stitch picking up and the ribbing and the binding off… All of that – it just isn’t whizzy or zippy or whip-up-able. It isn’t a dash through the night. Whatever way you look at it, it’s one stitch at a time and it’s slow. You have to learn to knit a row without dropping stitches or unintentionally making new ones, before you can learn to make extra stitches or holes on purpose. You have to knit and knit and knit and knit and then knit some more until your hands know their way on their own and it takes time.

So yes, you can knit a cardigan. It’s just that you can’t knit it straight away. Because knitting isn’t a straight-away thing. You will get to your cardigan one day and we will help you all the way but please don’t be in a rush. There are hundreds and thousands of stitches to knit before you get there and they are going to be totally great! And here’s the thing – they are great because of the time they’re going to take. There’s no secret passageway or shortcut keystrokes. You’ll go through bafflement and total clarity and then be back at bafflement again. Knitting will completely confound you and then one day you’ll see that it’s simple and obvious you won’t understand how there was ever a time you didn’t know how to do it.

That skater over there. She knows. That’s why she’s off like that. She’s finished her pompom hat, her scarf, the thrummed mittens and those ridiculously delightful mohair frilly socks. In fact she took forever to make them and she needed a bunch of help along the way, but now that they’re doing their wrapped-up-warming thing, they are rocket fuelling her on her way. That whoosh along the ice – it’s totally powered by knitting!