The Learner Has Passed the Master

Someone asked me recently why I do not design intricate knitting patterns.

It is a fair question. My crochet designs have complexity — construction that takes thought, stitch patterns that require attention, garments that demand something from the maker. But my knitting patterns are what I call Measure and Make. You take a simple measurement — the circumference of your head, your neck, your chest — and from there, a method unfolds that produces a garment sized to your actual body. Plain stitch patterns. Simple construction. Accessible to almost anyone who can knit in the round.

Why?

I had to sit with that question for a while before I could answer it honestly. What came up surprised me a little, even though it probably should not have.

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The Harmony Guides

My mother taught me to knit and to crochet.

We never used garment patterns. What we had were small books called The Harmony Guides — stitch pattern collections, nothing more. They showed you how to make cables, lace, texture, colour work. They did not tell you how to make a sweater. We designed the garments ourselves and used the books only when we wanted a particular stitch pattern for a particular section.

This is how I learned that making things up as you go is simply how it is done. I did not know any differently. And because I did not know any differently, I was not afraid of it.

Whatever I made, I brought to my mother.

Her standard response — and I can hear it now, in Afrikaans, in her exact voice — was: “Ja, dis oulik, dis nou nie wat ek sou doen nie, maar dis nie te bad nie.” Yes, it is cute, it is not what I would have done, but it is not too bad.

That was it. Every time. For years.

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What I Did With That

I tried harder.

As a child, and well into adulthood, I sought out the most difficult things I could find in knitting. Fair Isle. Lace. Cables. Brioche. Intarsia. I did all of it, and I did it successfully, and I brought it to her.

I knitted socks long before it became fashionable — long before the internet existed to tell anyone that sock knitting was a thing worth doing. I just did it because it was hard and I wanted to do hard things.

One sweater in particular. I made it for myself — a full panel of different cables in the Aran tradition. The centre cable had a forty-eight row repeat. This was before cell phones. I printed the cable charts and kept them in plastic sleeves. Each sleeve had a paperclip on the side that I moved down row by row as I completed each one.

I finished it. Of course I finished it.

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Thursday Mornings

When my children were young I homeschooled them. Thursday mornings they had an art lesson at a nearby school, which meant Thursday mornings were mine — dedicated to a visit to my mother, knitting in hand.

We sat in her lounge, each of us with something on the needles, talking about life. Those Thursday mornings were a rhythm I looked forward to. Whatever else was complicated between us, we always had the knitting.

On one particular Thursday morning I brought that sweater. The Aran cables. The forty-eight row repeat. The paperclips that had travelled down all those plastic sleeves.

She looked at it. She stroked it. And then, softly, in English — which was not how we normally spoke — she said:

“The learner has passed the master.”

Those were her exact words.

It is the closest thing to a compliment I ever received from her.

And it was enough. It had to be enough.

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What I Understand Now

Looking back from where I stand today, I can see what I could not see then.

I was desperate for recognition. For acceptance. For someone whose opinion mattered to me above most others to look at what I had made and say — simply, clearly — that it was good. That I was good.

It did not come. Not in the form I needed. And in the absence of it, I pushed myself further and further into complexity, as though the next difficult thing would finally be the thing that did it.

It never was.

But something shifted, somewhere along the way. I cannot point to the exact moment. I only know that at some point I stopped needing to prove anything — to her, to anyone, to myself. I had done the difficult things. I knew I could do them. That knowledge lives in my hands and it does not require external confirmation to remain true.

And once I stopped needing to prove it, I discovered something unexpected.

I love plain knitting.

Not as a compromise. Not as a lesser version of the real thing. As a genuine, deeply satisfying experience in its own right. The rhythm of it. The simplicity. The way your hands know exactly what to do and your mind is free to go wherever it needs to go.

Mindless knitting is one of my favourite things. I mean that without irony or apology.

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Why I Design What I Design

My Measure and Make knitting patterns exist for two reasons that matter to me equally.

The first is practical. Garment knitting is full of people who have finished something beautiful and found that it does not fit — because standard sizing does not account for the extraordinary variety of actual human bodies. Measure and Make starts with your body and works outward from there. The finished garment fits, because it was never designed for anyone but you.

The second is philosophical. Plain stitch patterns in simple construction are not boring. They are accessible. They are meditative. They are the kind of knitting you can do while your mind is processing something difficult, or while you are sitting in the sunshine listening to birds, or while you are working through something that does not have a name yet.

They are therapy. Real therapy, in the way that repetitive, rhythmic work with your hands has always been therapy — long before anyone called it that.

I have done the cables. I have done the lace and the brioche and the intarsia. I have knitted forty-eight row repeats with paperclips moving down plastic sleeves, and I have carried the finished result across a lounge to show someone whose approval I needed more than I knew.

I do not need to design that kind of pattern to prove I can. I proved it a long time ago.

Now I design what I love. Simple patterns that fit real bodies and give real people a reason to pick up their needles and not put them down until something in them has settled.

That is enough. That is, actually, everything.

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My Measure and Make knitting patterns are available on Ravelry. You bring the measurements. The pattern does the rest.