Hi. I haven’t updated in months. I was diagnosed with breast cancer, which sort of killed the knitting bug for a while, but now I’m back to knitting like crazy, and I plan to keep the blog updated. I’m sorry I haven’t kept up.
I think my yarn obsession dates to when I was about four, when my great-grandmother very graciously and patiently took the time to teach me how to crochet. She gave me a little ball of yarn that was leftover from some project of hers, loaned me a needle, and I promptly went to work. Before our visit was over, I’d been driven to the nearby Walmart (this was before there were Walmarts where we lived, so Walmart was a treat all to itself) where I got my own size G needle, and my grandfather bought me a skein of varigated yarn that was purple-and-pink-and-other-pastel colors that I thought was the most beautiful thing on the planet. I only learned how to crochet single-chain that visit, but I’d seen her slide the needle back through the chain to add another row, and after a little bit of trial-and-error, I figured out how to make little rectangles and circles once I was home.
Crocheting, sadly, didn’t exactly stick, although strangely I’ve never forgotten those basic stitches. But crocheting takes so long, and I quickly turned my yarn energies toward those plastic-square sheets, from which I made many tacky bookmarks, and then friendship bracelets once I was in junior high. At last, I figured out that yarn wasn’t really very cool, and so my sizable yarn stash was abandoned for so long that my mother finally threw it out.
But as Christmas 2005 approached, Seth and I found ourselves with more medical bills than we’d quite been prepared to pay and so I started brainstorming ideas for inexpensive Christmas gifts. Yarn was cheap, I recalled, and as far as I knew, my entire yarn collection was still safely ensconced at my parents’ house, anyway, and it should be a simple matter of dropping it in the mail–ere long, I’d be churning out scarves and hats and mittens for my whole family! Time is only money if you have money; otherwise, time is worth a lot less. So I was decided. The only problem was that I had no earthly idea how to knit!
I convinced Seth of the “wisdom” of my plan, however, and we were off to the craft store to buy a set of needles. I knew enough from crocheting to know that certain size needles went with certain sizes of yarn, so I picked up two skeins of yarn and appropriate needles at the same time. I wondered what the circular needles were for, but was pretty sure that I needed the straight ones first. Then we went home, and I sat at my desk and studied the Knitting Help website until I got the hang of the basic knit stitch. Then I started knitting like a fanatic. I even tried knitting in the dark once, which didn’t work so well (I was also half-asleep and in the middle of a longish car trip), but it evidenced my determination. I was drinking it up, amazed at all the things it was possible to do with some string and two sticks: cables, lace, colorwork, etc. Not that I knew how to do any of that, but the possibilities were astounding. I had caught the knitting bug, and before Christmas had arrived, I’d accumulated a little stash of knitting books, yarn, and my handy-dandy set of Denise interchangable needles.
I kept on knitting like a maniac until March. That was when we found out about Surgery Number One, and I was distracted by that and also by work, and then of course April brought the surgery itself, which made it impossible for me to knit for a while, and then May dawned with the cancer diagnosis. And that sucked the knitting bug right out of me. I had just started two Big Projects–multi-month-long-projects–and it occured to me that it was arrogant for me to have assumed that I’d be around to finish them. So instead I
rather morbidly assumed that I wouldn’t be around to finish them, and so I pulled them off the needles, folded them up, and they’re still sitting unfinished in the bottom of my knitting bag. During radiation I thought about knitting, and I actually tried a few times, but I just didn’t have enough energy.
I made sure my knitting things got left out of storage when we came to Delaware, however, and in September I dug my needles back out and started knitting again. Big projects still frighten me, but I’m steadily becoming more optimistic, and I haven’t frogged either WIP yet. In fact, I have a vague notion of digging one of them out and knitting like crazy to finish it by Christmas.
Anyway, all this background information, and what I really wanted to talk about is why I adore knitting. Probably a big part of it is that I’m famously bad at loving repititious things. (I’ve been known to count ceiling and floor tiles, for instance, and Seth has noticed that I have a real problem with obsessively pushing buttons over and over and over and…) So doing the same thing over and over again hundreds or thousands of times to make one tiny finished object doesn’t faze me. But the really cool thing about knitting is engineering. There’s a reason why knitting is traditionally a male-dominated activity! When you knit, you learn about how the different techniques result in different slants of the yarn in relation to the needle, and then when you join different types of stitches into those differing slants, you get different results. When you knit rows, you’re “supposed” to turn the work and do a different stitch (purl) on the wrong side of the fabric–but how cool is it to learn the way
the yarn and the needles work together to simply knit in reverse, instead, never turning the work and never purling? (I find purling hurts my wrists, which may be because I’m not holding the needles properly.) There are so many different ways to pull the yarn through the stitch to form a new knit stitch, and at first they seem identical, but eventually you start to see little predictable variations in the results, and you learn how different stitches work together to create the best final result.
Then there’s the whole design element: in addition to the obvious design choices like shaping and what color yarn you’re going to use, you get to choose which stitch pattern you like, what kind of cast-on looks best with your article, what kind of bind-off to use, what kind of ribbing, and whether you prefer cables or lace. And then at the really micro-level, there are subtle variations on stitches that make them stretch different ways or have a more pearlescent look. It’s so much fun. And it’s awesome when you’re finished a project, to look at it, and for better or worse, to know that it’s unique in the whole world.
And lastly, even though it isn’t crocheting, I can’t help but think occasionally of Great Gran–and Great Mammaw, whom I don’t remember but whose quilts have always been near at hand–and I feel like I’m continuing in an excellent tradition set out by my great-grandmothers. I remember lying in bed as a child, buried underneath one of Great Mammaw’s quilts; the quilt is very simple flannel patches sewn from leftover bits of clothing, and it was frayed and coming apart long before it fell to me, but I’d sit there and trace the squares with my finger and wonder if that square was from one of Great Pep-paw’s shirts, and if that square was from one of my great-aunts’ dresses. Mom tried to throw it away some years ago (in her defense, it is falling completely apart) and I rescued it from the garbage can. I wanted to show it to my children, and say, here’s the quilt your great-great-grandmother made and I slept under, and here’s another quilt she made that’s never been used even though she died decades ago, and here’s a doll afghan your other great-great-grandmother made, and here’s a doily your great-grandmother made, a quilt your other great-grandmother made, and a quilt your grandmother quilted, and an afghan she crocheted; and here’s a throw your mother made, and here’s some yarn and needles and fabric, go make a blanket of your own.