Learn to sew or knit something simple.

“I have no pictures of my first scarf, but you don’t really need to see it. It was a big old garter-stitch monstrosity, as all of them are, but mine was even wonkier than most. See, it took me a long time to figure out how to maintain a consistent stitch count. I kept mistaking the flipped-over stitch at the start of the row for two stitches, so the scarf had a big ugly bubble at one end, where the stitch count ballooned from 30 to something like 50 — and when I figured out what had happened, I was too afraid to rip back so I just looked up “decreasing” online and gradually brought the stitch count back to a respectable 35 or so.”

“I ironed the towels and hems first like she showed me, glad not to have to sit down at the machine straight away, but as I fished the bobbin thread out of the body of the machine or reversed the machine at the end of the fabric to secure the stitches of the first towel, I was surprised myself by how much I really knew.”