The Blob: Saga of a Simple-Minded Knitter

Mom learned how to knit from a book, then taught us, her daughters. I’m not sure why, but we all shared the size 10 ½ needles and blue acrylic yarn, taking turns working on The Blob that it became. It became a sampler of our experiments and mistakes with knitting and purling, increasing and decreasing, casting on and binding off. It was full of dropped stitches, holes, ridges, puckers, loose and tight stitches, and edges that advanced and retreated. And it kept on growing. As soon as someone put it down, someone else would pick it up and knit some more. We could do this!

Mom’s main passion has always been sewing. She and her thrifty Dutch mom and sisters created many of their own clothes, and ours as well, and tried to teach us their skills. This took with my older sister and cousins, who went on to create all manner of dresses and coats, and pillows and curtains. Not me or my younger sister. The mechanics of it bogged us down. Too tedious!

But knitting stuck with me. I loved the feeling and rhythm of it. I created doll clothes and bedding, hats, scarves, mittens, slippers and stuffed animals, moving on to tiny needles and fancy stitches to outfit my Barbie dolls. I made gifts for family members, including a huge red tie I knitted for my new brother-in-law. Mom went on to make some afghans with big needles and multiple strands of acrylic yarn. Then I made one, too, and so did big sister. But she doesn’t knit anymore (so how did she get all our afghans??).

One of our older cousins got the knitting bug, too. She is a lifelong knitter of beautiful classic sweaters. I got a hand-me-down from her as a kid, a cowl-neck form-fitting sweater in gold wool that she made in her teens. It looked professionally made. Whatever happened to it?

Santa Claus brought a plastic “spinning wheel” for me one year. This was spool knitting, controlled by moving the big wheel around, which moved the smaller one on which you hooked the stitches over the prongs. I made yards and yards of red cord, but not enough for a rug or anything useful. It would have required sewing to piece it together—eww!

Grandma H. taught me how to do single crochet one summer and I put that to use, creating edgings on my knitted things and making purses. Grandma was fond of making doilies and fancy little potholders that looked like dresses, before her fingers became crippled from arthritis. When she was growing up in Sweden she knitted and crocheted. She said she used to make a sock a day for her family members. Can you imagine? (Ooh, Twilight Zone moment; that’s a phrase I often heard Grandma say).

I haven’t been an obsessive knitter, but I think I could be. Reading, writing and playing music have consumed a lot of my so-called free time while raising a family. Over time I have taught myself cabled Aran knitting, color knitting, and knitting in the round. I’ve completed whole sweaters, and then completely unraveled them when they didn’t measure up—no way I’d waste the yarn (it must be the Dutch in me)! I have made Scandinavian-patterned Christmas stockings for my sons, sweaters for my mom and sisters.

In the past few years, because I wanted to be knitting more, but found it depressing to tackle large projects and then see them lying around unfinished for ages (that ubiquitous sewing dragon standing guard again), I took up knitting cotton dishrags from a pattern I found at a yarn store. These are the circular ones with thirteen points around the perimeter. They look so cool knit in variegated yarn—like stars! And I love working with color. I realized I could stuff this work into my purse and take it anywhere, to doctor’s appointments and Little League games and on car, plane and train trips, and not have to be concerned with a pattern, because it was easily memorized.

I have given dishrags away to family members and friends new and old. They’ve gone around the world to my Swedish cousins and to my son’s Italian exchange mom. It’s been fun to see people’s reactions to getting a dishrag. At first they might not know what it is and put it on like a hat, to be silly. Yeah, it could be an instant Catholic hat or Jewish yarmulke, perfect for whipping out of your pocket or purse when you need to get your head covered. Some people think they are too pretty to use as a dishrag. They prefer to use them as trivets or as doilies under flowerpots and other rough objects. It’s a gift that so small it doesn’t need to be reciprocated, and is always appreciated.

But dishrags do get boring after awhile. I’ve recently been checking out pattern and idea books lately, and going over my yarn stash. My fingers are eager for new projects. A friend and I went to a workshop on the linen stitch two months ago, given by Karen Alfke (www.2ndesign.com). I can’t wait for her to get a book together. I’ve been experimenting. I’ve started and re-started a scarf with chunky fuzzy yarn, but it has decided it would rather be garter stitch than linen stitch. I’m loving the soothing mindlessness of knitting it. I pick it up and put it down often.

I have an amazing, creative friend, Dena. She is a hardworking translator, writer and mom who knits and felts all the time. She inspires me bigtime. I could never keep up with her, but I always love to see what she is working on. We’ve had a couple of field trips together to yarn stores. What fun. But I find I have a hard time at these stores as I am easily overstimulated by all the choices, and end up not buying anything!

I’m proud that knitting is in my family and in my life. But I wonder what happened to The Blob. It probably got thrown away, having served its function as the repository of our learning. How I would love to see it hanging on my wall!

This was originally posted on Gather in May, 2007; it's one of the first articles I posted, and didn't get many readers. Re-posted for Gather Essentials: Writing, theme: handwork