if you want to knit it, you will be able to

Is it going to be very difficult? Do you think I’ll be able to manage it – I’m really not an advanced knitter.

It’s a straight forward enough question and it’s totally reasonable to expect me to be able to answer it. Ravelry even has a difficulty rating bar on the pattern details page. So why do I find it so hard to answer the question?

Mostly because even though the question is fair, I don’t get on with its premise. The knitter wants to know – on the basis of their existing knitting techniques knowledge – if they will be able to manage this new project. They know how to knit and purl and they’ve managed a hat. Will they now be able to make that lovely sweater vest? The answer is that you probably don’t know how to do everything in the new pattern, but that absolutely doesn’t mean it’s difficult.

The thing I really want to say is, if you want to knit it, you will be able to.

Almost every pattern has some elements which present us with something new. Even the things which you already know how to do are likely to be phrased a little differently this time. The new-to-me techniques I’ve encountered in the last year include a knit-only garter stitch sweater made seamlessly using a short-row turn, a hem which was folded and knit together, an applied i-cord that turned a corner to join up with another one, a yoke shaped with lifted increases, a rib worked with twisted purls, and a partially double-knit button band.

But were they difficult?

They were new and unfamiliar.

So were they tricky to manage?

I had to look up how to do them, read the instructions carefully. Occasionally I got it wrong and had to re-do it. I watched videos and sometimes asked other knitters to show me how they did it.

So the patterns were hard and it took a long time?

I had to learn and practice things I didn’t know before, and that meant some occasional stitchy detours and mistakes. But difficult, tricky and hard? I still don’t want to call it that.

This isn’t about me saying skills don’t matter. Of course you will need to learn the techniques to make that pattern. But not having those skills yet doesn’t need to rule you out of being able to make it. This is about your appetite to learn something new when you get to the bit that you don’t yet know how to do. It may be that the soothing repetition of a garter stitch scarf, is all you think you’re able for, but here’s the great part.. What you’re able for can change – and it changes in relation to what you know how to do.

And so perhaps in the end it’s really very simple why I don’t want to answer the question about whether the knitting will be difficult or not. Because if I’m honest, what I really want is for you to learn the thing that you don’t yet know. I want you to discover how to do German short rows and the genius of the gentle body-shaped curves they create, I want you to find out that there is a beautiful symmetry to the M1Ls and M1Rs that trace the raglan diagonals down the yoke, and that top down seamless knitting is within your reach. I think that the tubular cast-on is a thing of wonder and worth doing even though you’ve never done it before. I’m here to tell you that you can get the stitch count right if you use stitch markers and do the decreases where it says you should do them. What I really think is that if you managed to learn to knit and purl, you can manage this too. And if we can stop calling it difficult, and start calling it unfamiliar instead, you can turn the making of that project into something which gives you even more than a lovely sweater vest, cardigan, shawl or knitted postie wolf. It will move difficult even further away and might even give you a magic feeling that only the elixir of learning something new, can deliver.