The Knitting Author: How Kate Jacobs Learned to Knit

Writing The Friday Night Knitting Club was quite an experience on many levels: It was my first novel and exciting in that regard. Now, a reader doesn't need to be knitter to enjoy the story because the book is essentially all about the power of women's friendships. But it's true that the experience of writing about a group of knitters was also a very special way for me to feel a renewed sense of connection with my grandmothers, neither of whom is still living. Both women were very good knitters.
 
Rita, whom we called Grandma and who lived right down the street when I was a little girl, would knit afghan after afghan as she watched TV in the evenings, picking out colors of green and gold and orange and rust to match the chic 70s décor of our bedrooms. (Shag green rug, anyone?) Today, I have two of her afghans at my home in California and although they do not match anything at all, to me they are the perfect complement. I need to nap when I am writing  - I have a day bed in my home office for just this purpose! - and when I do have a rest I tuck in with the green-and-yellow striped number Grandma made over thirty years ago. I remain awed by the power of holding something that was stitched together with love by someone who loved me.
 
My dad's mom Dena, whom we called Nanny, is in many ways the model for the grandmother of Georgia, the main character who is at the heart of The Friday Night Knitting Club.  We kids used to sit around Nanny's kitchen table and play rummy and just talk, talk, talk: she had opinions about everything. Nanny was truly the quintessential white-haired, bread-baking, chicken soup-making grandmother. And she was so short! A little over five feet, I'd guess. As kids, we would always measure how grown-up we were by checking our height against Nanny, as soon as we arrived and then again as we were leaving. (You never know how much you can grow in a week, right?)
 
Nanny had mad skills when it came to knitting. She made all sorts of items, but the family favorites are the Cowichan baby sweaters and the curling (that's a cold-weather sport) sweater she made for my father, using a pattern she mapped out on graph paper and working her stitches to create images of brooms and stones and mountain scenery. Personally, I'm partial to the blue condo sweater that I wore in my sixth-grade school photo: My hair is in an Orphan-Annie style perm and I'm wearing coke-bottle glasses but the sweater looks fantastic!
 
Nanny knitted in the European style, and she kept her stitches very, very tight; she probably learned from my great-grandmother, who lived in a German-speaking community in Minnesota before moving, with her husband and a family that would grow to eleven children, to homestead on the Canadian Prairie. Nanny used her knitting to make socks and sweaters for her two kids and made sure to pass on her knowledge: My father tells a story that during the Depression, when my grandparents had only a few dollars to spend one Christmas, that Nanny and Poppa bought a 2-dollar roast to make a special holiday meal, a toy car for my father, and a pair of needles and a skein of yarn for my aunt. He remembers it as a very good Christmas indeed.
 
In later years, Nanny taught my own older sister how to knit, which she has always enjoyed. As for me, I was very resistant when I was a kid to learn anything that seemed to imply domesticity. I believed, quite sincerely, that having any sort of domestic skills would prevent me from following my career dreams and I wanted to be a writer. As a teenager, my idea of feminism meant rejecting all that was traditional women's work, and I took myself very seriously, emotions which I used to help develop the character of Darwin in The Friday Night Knitting Club.  It took me a long time to see that writing, like knitting, is also a type of craft and that rejecting traditions does not equal empowerment. I'm much more about balance now. And when, as an adult, I taught myself to knit from books and websites - and discovered I enjoyed it! - I keenly missed that Nanny was not around to offer advice. But at the same time, I feel as though I'm carrying on a tradition that mattered to her and that, even though my stitches are always loose, she would be quite proud.