I've been knitting for nearly my whole life. My mother handed me a pair of size 8 needles and a skein of yarn when I was about 7 years old, and showed me how to cast on and knit. I practiced and practiced, and my swatch of garter stitch grew from 15 stitches wide to 18 stitches to 20 stitches as I knit into odd loops or split my plies and made one stitch into two, and then it shrank down again to only 17 stitches as some slid off my needle or got dropped. It wasn't pretty.