knitwits

WASILLA — Gail Schuler was a child when she first tried learning to knit. Her mother stood by and showed her how to cast on stitches and deftly manipulate needles and yarn. Gail, however, felt lost.

“She was too quick for me,” she said.

Decades passed. Gail married, bore two children, and again thought about knitting.

“We have doilies, blankets, a bib my husband’s grandmother made,” she said. “I thought, wow, no one knows how to do this. As I get older, I see things like this dying out, the tradition. I wanted knitting to be something I knew how to do.”

Last month, Gail and her daughter, Monica, were shopping at Palmer Fred Meyer when they saw a flyer advertising Kathleen Meggitt’s Valley School of Creative Knitting classes. Gail’s husband was away on a hunting trip, so they decided to use the free time to learn how to knit.

Meggitt is a retired Anchorage School District secretary and master knitter who began knitting 18 years ago and has been teaching the craft for four years. She launched Valley SOCK classes in January out of office space at 4900 Palmer-Wasilla Hwy.

Gail and Monica enrolled in Meggitt’s beginning knitting classes, which cost $50 for three three-hour classes; they paid via PayPal from Meggitt’s website, www.valleysock.com. The cost covered yarn and other necessary supplies. Students who want to learn more afterward can enroll in Meggitt’s other classes, which focus on things like felted bags, socks, mittens, hats, lace and sweaters. Meggitt also offers classes on reading charts and patterns, Fair Isle knitting and using double-pointed needles.

Gail and Monica learned four ways to cast on stitches, how to knit and purl, stockinette and garter stitches, increases and decreases, ribbing and how to bind off their work. They enrolled in a felted-bag class after completing their beginning knitting courses. On Saturday, Gail proudly donned a variegated-blue scarf she had made, complete with attached fingerless mitts, before settling down with circular needles to knit a bag that will later be felted — shrunk in hot water.

“I have found that it was relaxing,” Gail said of Meggitt’s beginners’ classes. “I have confidence that I know all I need to do to make a scarf. The handouts are amazing. Monica said, ‘I don’t know how to bind off,’ and I’d say, ‘Look at your paper.’ You can think about other things once you get those stitches going, once it becomes more automatic. I scrapbook, but I can’t scrapbook in the car. This is the perfect thing to do on the way to Fairbanks, or as a way to relieve stress and stop thinking.”

The first thing knitters do when they start a project is knit a swatch, to determine and adjust the gauge of their stitches to the pattern they’re following. Gail’s first swatch was a light green tangle of wool, replete with dropped and twisted stitches. Her second looked more orderly, with two intentionally made holes in the middle of the knitted square.

“Making the swatch felt like an accomplishment,” Gail said. “Wow, that’s a cable, that’s an increase. You could see it. I literally went home, 40 years old, and said to my husband, ‘Look what we did!’”

Meggitt says her goals are to instill confidence and instruct students on the underpinnings of knitting.

“There’s only two stitches, then you mess with them,” Meggitt said of knitting. “There are a lot of good knitters who know how to knit but they don’t know why we do a right-slant increase or why we do a left-slant decrease. They can knit but they don’t know what they’re doing.”

It’s possible to knit almost anything that can be cut into strips, Meggitt said, displaying a tiny sweater she concocted out of delicate-gauge copper beading wire and bags made out of cut-up plastic bags.

“My husband and I commercial fish out in Bristol Bay, so I knit this out of hanging twine,” she said, holding up a bag made of line used for hanging fishing nets. “It’s hard on your hands, really rough.”

Meggitt enjoys showing her students the huge world of artistry bounded by knit and purl stitches.

“I just absolutely love teaching,” Meggitt said. “I like the light-bulb moments, and there are tons of them. It just tickles me. I’m responsible for teaching over 40 people how to knit, and some of them will teach a friend. It’s neat that it keeps going and going.”