There’s been a common thread in my teaching and editing work lately, and on the surface it’s all about sizing.
I like to tell a story: This career started for me because I have small feet. I’d just finished university; I was working in software and living near an excellent yarn shop. Remembering something I’d been told about my grandmother and her passion for knitting socks, I decided that I wanted to learn how to make them myself.
I bought a book and started to knit. To cut a long story short, all of the patterns in the book came in a single size, “women’s average,” and I’d made five or six sloppy, ill-fitting, and uncomfortable pairs before I realized that I could do better.
Buying the book, it never occurred to me that there was anything wrong with a single size, because that’s how we buy socks in the stores. But hand-knit sock fabric feels and behaves very differently than machine-made sock fabric, and it’s just so much better and nicer if a hand-knit sock is actually the right size.
Featured image by patricia serna on Unsplash
