One very proud daddy brought his eight-year-old son over to me before church started.
Both of them loved it when I gasped in delight at what they had to show me: the kiddo’s knitting.
Clearly someone who knew kids and who knew good yarn got him started: it was bright, had lots of colors, was soft, and a wool with just a bit of fuzz to it. Tactility, but not enough to snag on the needle. Hefty but not too thick, needles about a size US 9 or 10–not the tense-grip broomsticks like some kids get started on. Yarn that said Knit Me. It was gorgeous.
There were about three dozen stitches and they were close to perfect. He’d knit about an 8″ square in garter stitch.
Except it was a little wider at the top third.
The daddy explained (trying to help me hear over the organ prelude music, which my captions app was struggling with, too) that his son wanted to know what he had done that had done that and how to fix it.
I looked at the kiddo and told him, Every new knitter does that. I did!
He laughed with his dad while his face went, OH good!
It’s fine like that, I said, but if you want to make it smaller again, you put your needle into two stitches, as I gestured as if my index finger were the needle.
He clearly instantly grokked it. He’d already figured out that that’s probably how you do it but he wanted to ask before maybe messing anything up on this piece he was so proud of.
I saw him after church. He had made that slight decrease and from there the width matched the bottom part. He had already knitted about three more inches, maybe four.
What makes it all the more perfect is his name: Shepherd.