HANDKNITS EQUAL LOVE

This may sound a little cliché. But, as God was knitting my nephew, Durham, together inside my sister-in-love’s womb; I was busy knitting an oat colored baby poncho to keep him warm during his debut into the world.

As I knit, I was reading a hilarious and heartwarming knitting memoir titled YARN HARLOT: The Secret Life of a Knitter by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee. She writes:

Knitting is more than it seems. Knitting is a complex and joyful act of creation in my everyday life.

It really does seem so simple. Knitting is only two stitches, knit and purl, yet with those two ordinary acts we knitters can take a ball of yarn and a couple of pointy sticks and create something useful and beautiful. An average sweater takes God-only-knows-how-many stitches to make, each of them a simple act. Wrapping yarn around needles over and over and over again disconnects me from my cares. Knitting makes something from nothing, and it’s usually such an interesting something.

Even when it isn’t going well, knitting can be deeply spiritual. Knitting sets goals that you can meet. Sometimes when I work on something complicated or difficult – ripping out my work and starting over, poring over tomes of knitting expertise, screeching “I don’t get it!” while practically weeping with frustration – my husband looks at me and says, “I don’t know why you think you like knitting.” I just stare at him. I don’t like knitting. I love knitting. I don’t know what could possibly have led him to think that I’m not enjoying myself. The yelling? The crying? The fourteen sheets of shredded graph paper? Knitting is like a marriage (I tell him) and you don’t just trash the whole thing because there are bad moments.

I love knitting because it’s something that can be accomplished no matter how poorly it’s going at any given moment. It’s a triumph of dexterity over string. I can’t make my kids turn out the way I want; I have no control over my editor; world peace remains elusive despite my very best efforts; but– I can put a heel in a sock and it will go exactly the way I want it to go. Eventually, at least.

In general, I am a process, rather than a product knitter. I like the feel of the wool, the smell of the wool, the ritual of sorting through patterns, choosing the right needles, and casting on. I like the moment when the yarn tells you what it would like to be. I like getting past the first little bit of the knitting, to the point when I can see the pattern develop and start getting a sense of what I’m making. I like how much knitting is like a magic trick. You have string and sticks; you wave your hands about, and there you have it – a sweater, a sock, warm mittens, a blanket, a shawl. I admit that it can be slow magic. Sometimes you have to wave your hands around for a really, really long time.

Knitting is magic. Knitting is an act of creation and a simple transformation each and every time. Each knitted gift holds hours of my life. I know it looks just like a hat, but really, it’s four hours at the hospital, six hours on the bus, two hours alone at four in the morning when I couldn’t sleep because I tend to worry. It is all those hours when I chose to spend time warming another person. It’s giving them my time – time that I could have spent on anything, or anyone, else. Knitting is love, looped and warm.

My poncho for Durham is love, looped and warm. It's prayer and hope: a handcrafted welcome to the world! I can't wait for him to be wrapped in the wishes stitched into it.

It cracked me up, as I stitched the hood together, secured the pocket and wove in the loose ends when I came to a section at the end of YARN HARLOT titled PARENTS AND KNITTERS. I smiled as I read the pages, excited for all of the knitters and parents in the world . . . especially for my brother and his wife!

PARENTS AND KNITTERS

The top ten ways why being a parent is like being a knitters

1. You have to work on something for a really long time before you know if it's going to be okay.

2. They both involve an act of creation involving common materials, easily found around the home.

3. Both knitting and parenting are more pleasant if you have the occasional glass of wine, but go right down the drain if you start up with a lot of tequila or shooters.

4. With either one, you can start with all the right materials, use all the best reference books available, really apply yourself, and still get completely unexpected results.

5. No matter whether you decided to become a parent or a knitter, you are still going to end up with something you have to hand wash.

6. Parents and knitters both have to learn new things all the time, mostly so that they can give someone else something.

7. Both activities are about tension. In knitting, the knitter has control of the amount of tension on the object in progress. In parenting, the opposite is true.

8. No matter how much time you spend at knitting or parenting, you are still going to wish you could spend all your time at it. Which is odd, since both activities are occasionally frustrating enough that you want to gnaw your own arm off.

9. Knitting and parenting are both about endurance. Most of the time it's just mundane repetitive labor, until one day, you realize you're actually making something sort of neat.

10. One day, you will wake up and realize that you are spending hours and hours working at something that is costing you a fortune, won't ever pay the bills, creates laundry and clutters up your house, and won't ever really be finished . . . and the only thing you will thing about is that you can't wait to get home and do more.











love
This is the finished poncho, made with love, for Durham. Here's the link to the free pattern.
http://www.lionbrand.com/patterns/70361AD.html?noImages=