When I was a teenager seriously coveting a cabled vest in one of my mom’s knitting magazines, Mom told me, “It’s not your turn. Go knit it yourself.” And with that, she launched me forth into my knitting, bigtime. Go Mom!

Now, she had taught me how to knit when I was ten, on a summer-long road trip, but it had been awhile since I’d really worked at it: enough so that I couldn’t remember quite how to go about it. Being a teenager, I was not about to admit that and ask for help; I just sat there, yarn and needles in hand, trying to picture Mom’s hands at work and how the yarn was supposed to lay between which fingers. I did ask, now, how do you do that cast-on, again? But after that I went carefully off by myself where nobody could catch on that I wasn’t sure what I was doing.

The end result is that I concocted a knitting style that works perfectly for me and is utterly different from how she knits. It wasn’t till many years later that I discovered that, for my joint issues with my lupus, this was an exceedingly good thing, and that had I knitted Continental like I’d originally been taught, I probably never would have become a Knitter with a capital K. My style of grabbing the yarn every stitch involves virtually no wrist nor finger twisting and is far more comfortable for me.

That cabled vest came out gorgeous. Then the four-color Scandinavian sweater that I did in two weeks. Then the Vogue cardigan, good wool, all of them… I knit like crazy through high school–but then when I got to college, I found I just didn’t have the funds for the yarn anymore, nor the time, and let it go.

But then, later, married and graduated and with a baby on the way, I wanted her–I was sure she’d be a her–to have a handknit sweater. A cabled vest somehow seemed just the thing.

I went to Sears and bought some cheapo acrylic Red Heart. In fluorescent green. I know, I know… “Color is everything,” Constance Harker… There are those who will tell you that Red Heart softens up after the first time you wash it. And that may be true nowadays. It wasn’t true then, and the thing still feels like you could scrub burned pots with it. Unfortunately, thinking that’s all there really was out there to work with, knitting and yarn stores having become rare by then, that turned me off from knitting for a half dozen years or so, which I regret. All the cute baby things I never made!

But I wanted to show off this vest that I designed completely on the fly 25 years ago as a new mom-to-be. I look at it and think, not bad (don’t mind the seam coming apart at the bottom there. It’s earned its gray hairs-equivalent.)

And this is what I made when that daughter was about ten. We’d come a long way, baby.