Yes I remember my great grandma crocheting in her chair and then getting up to go weed in her garden. She was over 90 years old at the time and was very active, but didn't always remember us when we went to visit.
My paternal grandmother taught me how to crochet chains a bit when I was about 6 years old. But I didn't really learn the rest until I taught myself a couple of years ago. I always have a super hard time finding teachers and end up learning stuff on my own. Not too bad nowadays when there are tutorial videos all over the internet.
I learned by watching this woman's videos on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/user/knittingtipsbyjudy
Her website is
http://www.knittingtipsbyjudy.com/
She does a lot of professional knitting jobs for movies and commercials and photos of her work are on the website. What made me laugh was she did the giant sweaters for the Freddy Kruger character in Nightmare on Elm Street.
I went to Rossi's yesterday and got some free patterns that are all around the yarn and supplies.
I decided not to do the giant triangle shawl because the circular needles that were given to me are not long enough to accommodate one giant triangle and I don't have enough yarn to do the two piece triangle shawl and make it look nice, so I ripped all that out and now doing a poncho with large rectangles and sew them together. The poncho pattern was one I got yesterday and it looks easy enough.
The hardest part about knitting is having a kitten who decides that yarn is a really fun toy.