Category Archives: Knitting

It is finished. The blanket, THE blanket, the lap throw that beat up all the other lap throws, the knitted Christmas blanket for my husband.

Some questioned whether it would ever be done. I don’t even know how many stripes it has.

When Maud was little she had a blue flannel blanket we called a fuddy, nomenclature derived from Gil’s sister’s family. It was everything to her, she out-Linus’d Linus, tho she never sucked her thumb. As she got older she moved on to clutching a thick, brightly colored silk scarf of mine when she slept. She dreamed better. I still cherish that scarf. The more because she hugged it.

I never had a fuddy. But I sure liked making this one, with love, for Gil.

Yes, I did knit some today.

And when I wasn’t knitting, I was grocery shopping.

It was that kind of day.

It’s Giants football time in my household. Here’s the announcer:

He’s just gonna run by everybody, awww, just past his fingertips…

I wind up there too, on the couch, knitting in hand, just a small piece, counting stitches, the little bumps in the patch of wool, a midnight blue strip of sky I’m building loop by loop into a recognizable thing.

This is one active, moving group of good football players!

I like a couple of things about football, and one is the goggle-eyed tone of the announcers.

What a big time stand by the Ravens! That was huge and inspirational…

The other: the towels the players wear tucked into the front of their pants — a codpiece, dish rag, hanky that I’m sure is somehow crucial to the play, but always seems to inject an unexpected female sensibility into the macho sport.

It’s been an evolutional process… they provided him with a lot of great weapons…

How about knitting as contact sport — no, beyond the needles, though they of course would come in handy in a dark alley.

Knitting writ large.

I saw an art installation some years ago on Governor’s Island in New York Harbor, that employed dozens of people to knit swaths of a gigantic American flag.

I remember that even the clothes of the participants were handworked. And it all seemed so zany. I didn’t knit then.

The artist who orchestrated this giant adventure out of yarn (and statement — it was an anti-war effort) was Liz Collins, who has since gone on to other interesting large-scale projects, such as the one titled Mend, where people were invited to bring in their frayed clothing to be repaired by Collins’ minions.

Boy, that’s a big statement — straight off the fingertips! Incomplete.

First things first. Textile codpieces all around, hand crafted by the nation’s home knitters for each and every footballer. I suddenly see a use for the midnight yarn in my lap. Aren’t the Giants blue?

That’s a good physical finish and a nice cut.

Why, thanks.

I have been knitting lately. A lot. I am putting aside cares that my craft is amateurish, that I can’t do lace or cable-work, that I drop a stitch every other row or so. Because I like to knit so much, I am focusing on the now, with a tiny inkling in the back of my head that the more I knit, the better I will get, and that someday a sweater is in my future. Nothing is stronger than habit, said Ovid. In this case, the habit of knitting and purling several hours a day.

It helps that I like to make things that are lumpy and bumpy, they hide a multitude of sins. Let’s hope the holiday recipients of my works think so.

The ingenuity and skill of some knitters inspire me. Like the chair upholstery by Elise, the woman who owns the local knit shop, Flying Fingers.

Or, more insane but great, the bikini with which an artist named Jessie Hemmons draped the statue of former mayor Frank Rizzo in Philadelphia, wanting to “facilitate a conversation about whether this cultural view of a man being emasculated and ‘disrespected’ by simply dressing him in feminine clothing is representative of and in accordance to current beliefs that women are viewed as equal to men.” She calls herself the Yarnbomber of Philadelphia.

Wool doesn’t have to be practical in a grannyish sort of way. Peruse this story from the 1892 New York Times, about a young woman whose life was saved when a ball of yarn she was carrying blocked a bullet. All kinds of exciting knitting stories exist if you’re only willing to entertain them. But since the days when people only knew the knit stitch, in the Middle East in the 11th century, working in the round to make stockings — hear what I’m saying? nobody knew how to purl! my nemesis — creating fibrous fabric in this way became crucial to society. There were lots of cold feet in the centuries before, and warm ones after, even if their coverings were lumpy and bumpy.

This afternoon I had what felt like a covert assignation alongside a sheepfold in Putnam County, meeting a woman named Fern to conduct business out of the trunk of her Ford sedan. The purpose: wool. Yarn, to be specific, yarn that she had hand spun from the wool of heirloom sheep into soft and sturdy all-natural skeins. Fern is an expert modern shepherdess, if you could call her that, with a family business called Snook Farm that raises Jacob and Cotswold sheep, both antique varieties that happen also to be endangered species. I found the wool ravishing, gleaming in its homespun hominess, slubs and all. I chose these skeins that looked as though the prettiest girl in town could have knitted a wrap with them in about the 12th century.

Fern spun the stuff of Cotswold wool, then dyed it using onion skins and almonds, dipping it again and again into the colored liquid to give it its variegated appearance. About the Cotswold, its coat has a subtle golden tint. Apparently Florentine merchants made pilgrimages to England in the 13th century to bring back the shiny, linen-like wool. And even before that it was woven with delicate wires of gold to make  garments for ancient priests and kings (really, see Exodus 39:1-3).

Knitting.

I love to knit.

That doesn’t mean I am any good at it. It is my great dream that somehow, someday, the genius of the soft clickety clack of needles will come to me. I have a short bucket list, but near the top is cable knit. (I have a much longer fuck-it list, things I refuse to do before I die — like bungee jump.)

For now, I am making lemonade out of lemons by cultivating the simplest of scarves. My stitch is the absolute base point of knitting: the garter stitch, which is comprised only of knit stitch, over and over again. Do not laugh; master knitter Elizabeth Zimmerman (no relation) published a whole book of garter stitch designs.

And I’m using the wool of the Jacob Sheep, an heirloom, small, piebald (white and black) sheep that boasts between four and six horns. (The biblical Jacob bred spotted and speckled sheep.) My un-died wool is handsome in a coarse way, spun the morning I bought it from her by the woman who raised the sheep. Plenty of slubs, and even some burrs.

Plain, plain, plain, this scarf, like the one a young, lonely David Copperfield would have wrapped around his neck in the middle of the nineteenth century. Exquisite and homely, intertwined.