My grandma was a perpetual knitter. Mittens, hats, xmas stockings, baby booties: she knit a lot. At some point during my childhood, she tried to teach me how, but I was apparently in an ungrateful brat stage and never really learned. In a semi-conscious effort to not feel as lost after she died, I took up my grandma's favorite hobby. It seemed that something from those very early lessons stuck in the back of my brain, because once my mom showed me again how to cast on, I knew instinctively that there was a right way and a wrong way to
knit. I knit
continental, like Gma did. The
English method looks wrong and feels so wrong to me that I pretty much can't do it that way. I thought it was interesting that the continental method is also called the German method. I wonder how many generations ago this way of knitting started and then was passed down through my German (great) grandmothers...?
I started out, as many do, with scarves. I found out that I don't much like purling, so that left either a garter stitch scarf (bleah) or an excruciating stockinette, with every other row an entire row of purl! I decided to learn how to make cables. I made
this scarf, one for my mom and another for my buddy M. The back and forth of scarves wore on me a little bit, so I learned to
knit in the round on a circular needle and started on hats. Then I got bored with hats and decided socks were just the thing. I made a dozen or so pairs of socks after I discovered wooden needles. Gma always knit with shiny aluminum needles. I find them to be cold and hard; they don't have much "give" at all. I found myself wondering if Gma knew about wooden needles (she undoubtedly did, I guess aluminum needles would have been kind of space age, plus they don't break) and would they have made it easier for her to knit (she had arthritis in her hands).
I'm still not bored with socks, but I wanted to take on another project, so I knit a sweater for little boy. I was intimidated by most sweater patterns, but I found one that lets you knit the darn thing on circular needles and you don't have to make any seams. Although I had to remake the sleeve cuffs twice (not quite long enough for those arms of his), it looks great on him. I have a nearly-complete sweater for Big Boy (almost done with the first sleeve, then it got warm out). I guess I'm not as intimidated by sweaters any more since I rewrote the pattern to an in-between size for Big Boy. Then I scoured cable pattern books until I found a cable pattern that was pretty close to what I wanted and then rewrote that a little and finally added the whole cable panel to the front of the sweater design.
Finally, five years after I started, I hit on Gma's favorite project: mittens. How did I think that mittens would be harder than socks? These little suckers took me less than two hours and I haven't knit since last winter:
Granted, they are sized for a two-year-old, but I think I have the concept down. A few more little pairs are on my list, but then I think I'm next in line. I often feel like I'm not even using my own brain when I knit, it seems like I'm borrowing my grandma's. Ok, that sounds weird, but I get the same feeling when I'm doing plumbing projects (I'm channeling my grandpa at those times!).
