The Yarn of My Life

I was slow learning to knit as a child. The holidays I spent with my mother were too short and too filled with family adventures for her instruction to take root. My brother had no interest in knitting, so we couldn’t knit as a family. Our holiday crafts were assembling plastic models of airplanes, knights, and monsters, and painting by numbers. So the little knitting instruction she gave me in those years didn’t stick very well.

Most of the year Eric and I lived with out paternal grandparents. Grandma also knitted, and her teaching stuck better, but then she died when I was nine years old. Grandpa Lou was not a knitter, but Great Aunt Anne was. She took up the challenge of continuing my training, also without much success.

I knitted a necktie for my sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Barbush. It was basically the right shape, but the yarn and needles were way too big and the straight knitting stitch was way too lumpy for the finished product to even resemble a necktie. Nevertheless, Mr. Barbush actually wore it the day of the gift, and thereby won much merit, good karma, and jewels in his crown.

Mother knitted every family member a turtleneck sweater one Christmas. Each sweater had triangles in a contrasting color knitted into the fabric around the neck and shoulders. The kids’ version had one row of triangles, and the larger ones for adults had two rows. They were knitted of sturdy wool, and were much too warm most of the time. As I grew up, the knitted fabric tried to adjust to me, growing wider (and correspondingly shorter) over the years, but eventually I could no longer get into it.

These sweaters had been knitted in the round, on four double-pointed knitting needles. This technique had too many moving parts for me to manage at that time. Mother tried to encourage me with stories about how my father knitted himself socks that way, anchoring one end of a needle in his belly button when it threatened to get away from him.

She did succeed in teaching me a complicated stitch that created rows of knotted loops. She said it was intended for creating furry fabric, by cutting the loops in half and brushing the ends until fluffy. I couldn’t bring myself to cut the loops; I really liked the texture of the rows of densely packed loops. The resulting fabric was very thick and warm. I decided to knit myself an afghan this way. However, I knew nothing about designing a pattern to result in a particular knitted shape. I just bought a ball of each color and type of yarn that appealed to me, and knitted the same arbitrary number of stitches in each row until the ball ran out. Since I had paid no attention to the contents or weight of the yarn, the balls were of varying weights and lengths. So I wound up with around 40 rectangles of various lengths and widths. I had to sort them into rows of approximately the same length before sewing the pieces together. The result was a small afghan of many colors and textures, but, boy, was it warm.

During my high school years when I lived with Mother, she guided me through every stitch of a complicated pattern for a fisherman’s sweater. She had to show me every step at least once, but I finally succeeded in finishing the sweater correctly. It was a tour de force, and I was very proud.