Puppies are bad for knitting...

Argh!

Puppies are good for knitting!

So cute! So cuddly! So incapable of removing the garments we put on them!

mamalamarama

More. I am nothing if not redundant.

Literary Knitting Heroines

A list, to be augmented:

DeFarge.

Wavey Prose, Beety, and Bunny Quoyle, from Annie Proux's The Shipping News. Obviously important to me, as I've discussed..

Elizabeth Bennett - a great literary heroine to be sure, but really, I can't remember if knitting actually occurs in the novel, and if it does, I don't see it as very Lizzy-like. Knitting makes her like the rest of the women in her world. Reading, walking outdoors, turning down marriage proposals make her beloved.

Molly Weasley - the grande dame of Potter knitting. I'm planning to make my children Weasley sweaters for Christmas every year too. Ok, maybe just Mamalama sweaters, but hey - maybe Molly and I use the same pattern.
Dobby. unmatched socks, good enough for a ball. With broomsticks and snitches, even.
Hermione - elf hats. Must reread this. Did they have holes for ears?

Marion Winik, in First Comes Love (yes, I know she is a real person, and that book is memoir, not fiction, but...). That line about a great big red piece of nothing that she knit after loosing her baby has always stuck with me. And she called the baby Pee Wee! I just love her books, that's all.

Goodness. There must be millions of novels out there with characters who knit. Even recent novels. Can you think of any?

Knitting Book Rant

First, let me say that I am delighted to see so many wonderful new books of knitting patterns hitting the shelves. You guys rock. I might even buy a couple, instead of xeroxing the patterns from friends or from the library. But why is the first half of every knitting book filled with detailed descriptions of the basics - How to cast on. The knit stich. The purl stich. I will accept that some beginning knitters will appreciate having one or two books of beginner instructions, along with some lovely beginner patterns. But does it have to be in every book? In your book? And I saw this as a person who basically learned to knit from books. Can't you trust that they'll go out and buy a bigger, better book of instructions (or borrow it from the library)? And frankly, many of these books are full of patterns that no begining knitter is ever going to follow anyway. Look- with that space, you could have included 5 more patterns. Or pictures of each pattern in a different yarn. Variations on the theme. What a baby sweater looks like in the 3 months size, and what the same sweater looks like in the 2 year size. Ok. I'm done now.

The Mamalama sweaters

K calls me mamalama sometimes, when I am putting her to bed, and she has just one more thing to tell me before I leave the room.

I started making these sweaters as a modification of the Baby Delight cardigan. Basically, I've become a lazy knitter. I don't like seaming. I don't like carrying a pattern around with me. I like to knit on the ferry, at work in lab meetings - places where I need EASY knitting. I also like the way raglan sleeves look. So, these sweaters are my mindless knitting. Round and round and round - start at the top, and stop when they fit. I do the sleeves back and forth, because I don't like double pointed needles, which means I have to sew up the underarms, but that's it. I make a square for a pocket, and then let the kids pick an iron-on patch to put on the pocket (originally, this was because B wanted a bunny, and I was too lazy to find a very small bunny intarsia pattern). The first one I did (the spiral one) has a square of intarsia sewn onto it, which was a lazy version of the front of the sheep sweater, so clearly, my laziness is progressive.


But a cool thing about these sweaters (especially the ones worked in Bernat Denim Style, which is super duper cuddly) is that they stretch longer as kids wear them, and we wash them. This can lead to a neckline that stretches too big, but also means that the sweaters have grown along with the kids. Here is K, wearing the spiral sweater when she was 2, and she is still wearing it now, at 5. Of course, being my kids, they aren't growing like beanpoles or anything, so results might vary.

How I learned to knit- the version in which heroine and heroin swap needles

Do you remember that horrible apartment I lived in - on E. Hyde Park Blvd at the north edge of Hyde Park, in Chicago, as a first year graduate student at The University? It was student housing - a converted hotel. We lived on the 9th floor, in a north facing unit. The entire apartment had a floor of brown linoleum, and metal cabinets in the kitchen, radiators under the windows in the living room.

So, I was sitting in that miserable living room, with my feet on the radiator, watching the snow blow across my window, and wondering how I was going to keep from going further insane while waiting for my husband to return from his forays to the west side, with my car, and whatever might be left of my money. I read a lot of emotionless academic journal articles. I read a lot of distractingly emotional novels. I drank a lot of tea, and coffee, and alcohol.

One of the books that I read, huddled there against the radiator, in my cozy salvation army recliner, was The Shipping News, by Annie Proulx. I loved this novel for many reasons, but I was particularly inspired by the knitting in the novel. It seemed like the perfect thing - to be surrounded by bright, warm wooly yarn in front of a warm fire (substitute) on those blisteringly windy days. And to be busy with something other than waiting, or pacing, or making deals with God, or making deals with myself about how long to wait before I started calling jails and institutions.

Actually, what seems most incredible to me about this today (with its reprieve from that sadly credible insanity) is that when I went back through The Shipping News to methodically locate these descriptions of knitting that so inspired me, I found out that knitting is hardly mentioned at all. The first mention that I could find was on page 251, where Bunny tells Quoyle that Beety is teaching her to knit, and that she is making him a scarf. Later, Wavey gives Quoyle a sweater "the color of oxblood shoe polish". There is a longish section about knitting fishermen, for whom knitting and net-mending were closely related, and a joke about a knitting truck driver. When Wavey is in St. John's with Quoyle, she sees "a lovely Shetland wool that would make a Fair Isle sweater". I think that was the line that inspired me. I could imagine the feel of it, and the muted colors. But now I like best what Bunny says - "It's kind of a trick, Dad, because it's just a long, long, fat string, and it turns into a scarf".

Remembering that I had, sort-of, knit before, I put on my Sorel boots and coat, and walked over to the Woolworth's that was by the grocery store, near the 53rd st. train station. It must have been one of the last Woolworth's open. I bought a ball of white wool-acrylic blend yarn, and one of those pamphlet books, "Teach yourself to Knit and Crochet". I guess I must have bought needles too. I remember a woman in line saw the yarn, and asked me if I knew how to make pompoms, and I apologetically showed her the booklets by way of explaining that I didn't know anything. And then I went back out into the cold, and back up to the ninth floor, and made a big tangle. I actually wrapped my purls wrong for about 7 years after that, because it's hard to learn to knit from a book.

How I learned to knit- the wholesome version

This is a Panda Bear that my Great Grandmother Mimi crocheted for me when I was born. My children have it now - which means it represents 5 generations of women in my family.

When I was about 5, Mimi and my grandparents came out from the East Coast to visit us in California. I remember sitting out on the deck, and Mimi trying to teach me to crochet a great long chain. I'm not sure anymore how much of this is real memory, and how much is just memory of photographs of us sitting out there. Anyway, she taught me to chain. She made us afghans, and some crocheted slippers for my mother. Like my ex-grandmother-in-law, she was incredibly talented and yet just about everything she made was Red Heart acrylic in 70's colorways. To be fair, Mimi didn't live past the 70's, while my ex came to college in 1990 with a new orange and brown afghan from Betty (but I'm getting ahead of myself now, and somehow terms like ex-grandmother-in-law are undermining the Wholesomeness thing).

I don't think I ever actually crocheted anything again until I started knitting, but throughout my childhood, I was enamored of fiber-art projects. I did those nylon loop potholders. I did a latch-hook unicorn rug, and a latch-hook dog. I walked around Montera Junior High School with embroidery floss safety-pinned to my jeans, making those woven friendship bracelets that turned into muddy brown cables in soccer season, and probably drove my mother nuts. At some point in high school, I decided to learn how to knit, and bought a skein of teal acrylic yarn and some aluminum needles. I had found a copy of Good Housekeepings New Complete Book of Needlecraft (1971) on our shelves, and tried to follow the diagrams for knitting. I did manage to knit a few rows, but my gauge was so tight it was hard to get the needles into the stiches. I know this, because I stopped working on it, and put the yarn and needles (with knitting still on) in my mother's sewing basket, where it stayed, in an increasing state of knottiness, for the next 10 years.