In the last fifty years knitting has typically been cast as women's work or, more lately, a strictly female hobby.

This is hard on the guys who knit (and we love our guys who knit) and it's not a coincidence that it's not taken that seriously and that knitting is often used as a metaphor to mean something dull, easy or old-fashioned while at the same time people often suggest that it's too difficult to learn, or that if you knit you must have a lot of time on your hands.

Well, we know what knitting is really like – it can be dull (remember the third foot of that first garter stitch scarf?), easy (when you know how!) or old-fashioned (like this beautiful book) but it's also a vibrant, changing hobby with lots of exciting designers and yarn-makers creating things that make you go 'ooh!' – and which you can make all over again, in your own way, in your own time, in your own home.

It's brilliant, really.

And as March 2010 plays host to both Mother's Day (14 March in the UK) and World Women's Day (8 March) we'd love to turn this stereotype on its head and celebrate the wonderful women who taught us to knit and helped us on our way. We'll be posting some of our stories, but you can help us get started by emailing us (if you'd like to share a photo, perhaps) or leaving a comment below.

Simply Knitting is the result of a lot of hard work by a lot of women – more women than men, funnily enough – over the years and you can see two of them at the top of this entry: editor Debora Bradley and her mum, Audrey. "Mum taught me to knit and without that I'd never have found myself working on Simply Knitting," says Debora, "but she has also always encouraged me to try new things and to go as far as I can, both personally and professionally. It's important to remember, even if it's just once a year on World Women's Day, that we are standing on the shoulders of the generations which came before, the suffragettes who won the right to vote, the feminists who fought for equal pay as well as our own personal heroes."