A letter to my knitting friends

Dear Yarners Dear Friends !!! I started to calculate some my Knitting facts in my life, for the fun of knowing, and for being thankful that knitting is the craft i have been doing almost all my life. Yesterday i became 80, and as far as i know my first `knitting` was when i was about 3.5, with short wooden sticks and some coarse very itchy wool. Since than i went on knitting small items, dishcloths, doll`s clothes , mostly with uneven sides and some mysterious shapes and holes. But the drive was there. My mother knitted all our sweaters vests etc.  In those times, materials were scarce, so once you grew out of a sweater it was unraveled and re-knitted with some other wool into a new one. In the 3rd grade all girls were taught to knit socks in school. Since my mother lived in Paris in her lower school years she learned to knit the French way, and that is how i knit until now [ without holding one needle under my left arm].  I had at first a problem with the teacher who insisted on knitting the German way. My seconed problem was the Green wool we all got .. and being me i took some red wool my mother had and knitted some red stripes into the 2nd sock…. Teacher was furious and my mother was told to restrict this dangerous unhealthy creativity. I went on knitting and started to wonder about that last stitch of the row i was told `to slip to the other needle without knitting it` by the handwork teachers, Wriiten instructions etc, nobody could explain to me why i should do it, so i started to experiment and found my knitting looked much better when i did not knit the last st. Since than i have tried and sort of worked my own ideas about all those `rules` . BY 7th grade i already helped friends with knitting calculations, repairing fallen stitches etc. I always was interested in knitting history, fascinated by other knitters` creations, i wanted to understand why and how multy colored threads make their patterns…….and i am still learning and playing with patterns threads etc. During the last years i got CPPD and as the doctors wondered how i kept my round movements but not my straight movements, they assume it is because i knitted all those years. I play with patterns `take them apart` and try to knit them in reverse from the top down . mostly knit in one piece. lately because of body changes had to rework the old Raglan formula of shoulder neck shoulder [divide front into 3] to fit my new proportions. I LOVE TO KNIT and am thankful it is in my life. Ps i think i might have knitted enough to cover a huge part EARTH. And i thank knitting for enriching my life with `Meeting you all` THANK YOU ALL MY KNITTING FRIENDS.