There are words for people who spend hours sitting around tying knots. Knitter is only one of those.
I hadn't knitted for awhile. It was summer and there were things to dig out of the earth and weeds and briers to cut and, well... other things to do. Then, this week, our grandaughter came to visit.
She doesn't visit, exactly. That was last year and all her other years before this. Times were when a visit from the kid meant hours in the kitchen baking things and watching over her as she cooked her special kinds of soup, flavored with herbs she gathered for herself out of the garden, and taking great long walks in the country and going on bike rides. I taught her to spin one year. She taught herself to knit by watching me in the car mirror (so that her own knitting was backward). She went fishing with her Papaw and helped him fashion things out of wood. We built fires in the firering and she'd cook like a pioneer or simply roast smores.
Now she's 14. She doesn't bake cookies, knit, spin, go for walks, cook, ride bikes or go in for conversation. She just needs a place to sit where no one will interrupt her extremely wired lifestyle (blogging, e-mailing, texting, and listening to her Mp3, while watching videos on tv). Her best kind of fun is being in a car, listening to music and going anywhere (as long as she doesn't have to actually arrive anywhere). And, we had lots of places we needed to be this week.
So, my Honey drove the car, our grandaughter listened to music, and I knitted. I knitted her a black moebius scarf with feathered edging. I gave it to her, hoping my effort would renew her interest in knitting or in spinning. She twirled the scarf twice around her neck and went back to listening to Avrile Lavign. I squelched the tendency to say "you're welcome" when she didn't say thank you. Give them room for angst in their year(s) of discontent. It will pass soon and they'll come back to themselves and remember what you've taught them and better yet, will teach you things you didn't know.
I glanced at her in the mirror, wearing the scarf the drive to Richwood, to Fayetteville, to Beckley had produced. Then I cast on 35 stitches to begin a pair of fingerless mitts to match the scarf.
I was only knitting to use up the yarn stash and take up the time. Some of this yarn has been in random baskets for years, moving with us from Asheville, to an apartment in Summersville to an apartment in Lewisburg and to this house in Western Greenbrier county. It was time it became something. Knitting for my Grandaughter is important. Now more than ever. I put prayers into the stitches. Be yourself I breathe to the stitches, hoping this whisper will keep her from following anyone blindly -- including me.
By the time the kid went home at the end of the week, knitting fever had taken hold. (For me, I'm saying.) I knit a green cotton scarf. I'd kept this skein from 2003. A display of cotton yarn in Earth Guild in Asheville -- the green was left from a weaving project. The scarf calls for yarnovers every 4th row and then they are dropped to make ladders. A quick scarf to make.
Going to Roanoke yesterday, I knitted a pair of handwarmers from purple wool. I'd used part of this wool in a scarf for the kid several years ago. I'd paired it with sparkly silver thread in the scarf. She'd been so proud of it at the time. She was so young then. We'd taken her to Chucky Cheese and we had our picture made together. She smiled and smoothed the picture the three of us together. Now she calls me by a nickname she made up and she calls Papaw by his given first name. She is trying to distance herself, a needful task.
I figure she'll make the rounds again back to things she once enjoyed, the way I do. Knitting was something I learned only because I needed something to do with the yarn I spun. And because my Grandaughter wanted her Grandma to knit "like Grandma's do".
Eventually projects called for their own kind of yarn and I ended up buying as much as I spun and that seems to be happening again. I took to knitting this time because there is so much yarn to be worked into something and I reserve my weaving for my homespun or the recycled material and not professional yarns.
I have a new book of patterns called Hattitude http://knitting.about.com/od/reviews/fr/hattitude.htm I'm knitting guages trying to match yarns I have (both homespun and purchased) to those called for in the patterns, but I can see some of these will require new yarn. And I could use another pair or two of needles -- sizes I don't have yet, or KINDS I don't have. I can see the stash will grow rather than diminish.
Knitting has come back again, not as busywork for hands that hate being still, not because my Grandaughter still needs her Granny to be of the cooky-baking and sock-knitting variety, but because I see the things I want to make and I want to make the things I see. I love the feel of the yarn and the click of the needles -- more so as the rain falls and the wind blows and winter moves in.
I'll blame it on long evenings and the weather, but it's really just cycles of things. I'll sit here this last evening of November and spin a thread for a project to put my needles to, remaining one of those people who sit around for hours tying knots.
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