What to knit first

Four properties, and a project with all four is hard to fail:

• It finishes in a few evenings — The single most important one. Skill comes from completing things, and a project that takes a month teaches one project’s worth of lessons in a month.
• The size does not have to be right — Anything that has to fit means the gauge has to be matched, and matching gauge is a second skill stacked on the first.
• It uses one stitch — Garter stitch — knit every row — until the hands know what they are doing. Alternating stitches is a separate lesson.
• It is useful even if it is bad — A wonky dishcloth washes up. A wonky hat is a wonky hat, and it will sit in a drawer reminding you of a bad week.

A scarf fails the first of these badly and the fourth mildly. It is not that it is hard — it is the easiest thing in knitting — but that it is a long tunnel with no landmarks, and the majority of abandoned first projects are scarves. Anybody who genuinely wants a scarf should knit two small things first and then knit the scarf properly, which will also be a better scarf.

• A dishcloth — The standard answer, and standard for good reasons. Cotton, small, square, finished in an evening or two, immediately useful, and the mistakes make it scrub better.
• A blanket square — The same virtues, plus a reason to make the next one. Forty-eight of them is a blanket, and knitting them one at a time over a year is how a great many blankets have been made.
• A headband — The first thing that has to fit, and a good introduction to why rib stretches. Small enough that getting the size wrong costs an evening.
• A scarf, third — Once the hands are reliable. By then you will also want to put a slipped edge on it, which is the difference between a first scarf and a good one.

We publish full patterns for all four, written out with the gauge and the finished measurements checked against each other. They are free to knit and free to sell what you make from them.

Less than a beginner kit contains. One ball of smooth, light-coloured, plain yarn in a medium weight, and one pair of needles the size the ball band suggests. That is the whole list, and it costs very little.

Three things are worth avoiding specifically at the start, all of which are sold enthusiastically to beginners. Dark yarn, because you cannot see the stitches and every problem becomes twice as hard to diagnose. Fluffy or textured yarn, for the same reason with worse consequences. And very fine yarn, because the same object takes four times as long.