I LOVE TO KNIT. I love my daughter. Shouldn’t the two go together?

She begged. She pleaded. When I picked my needles up this fall after a summer-long hiatus, the Rock was determined. This, her fifth year on our spinning blue planet, would be the one. She was going to learn to knit.

Did I mention she’s 4? And a half?

I know that there are supermoms reading this who have all kinds of great advice about handwork for kids, and I applaud them. And their patience.

Patience is not one of my virtues.

But she can be very, uh, persuasive, and the embroidery experience with the Rock went off much better than expected. Perhaps that relative triumph gave me the foolhardy confidence to try her hands at knitting.

We began a scarf together. Within 20 minutes, I was holding the left needle, she had the right, and was whooping and swooping the yarn around to make every knit stitch. Never mind that it took 10 minutes per row; we were both delighted with her progress. While it was hard for her to hold the needles, insert the right hand needle into the left hand stitch, or remove the new stitch from the left hand needle–she knew what needed to be done. And her mastery of the order of things, if not the ability to do them, quickly turned her into a tiny needlework needler.

“No, Mama! You’re not doing it right!” she shrieked as I tried to pick up a dropped stitch.

“No, Mama! I want to use the other purple now!” (I’d raided my stash for Rock-friendly colors to stripe in.)

After about an hour, I pleaded exhaustion, distracted her with watercolors, and called it a day. I thought she’d drop it.

But the next night, as we were settling in for a Sunday night family movie, and I took up my own knitting, she looked at me, horrified. “No, Mama! We have to do my knitting!”

As we sat huddled together, poking, looping and slipping stitch after careful stitch, she beamed.

“See, Mama? I can knit in the dark, too.”

Indeed.

No related posts.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Amy’s project, entitled The Beckoning of Lovely, turned out to be a perfect fit for me right now: I’m trying my hand at a new creative outlet (neither cooking nor knitting involved, and I promise to reveal all one of these days) and because of that, and the usual chaotic state of my life, I have been spending a lot of time pondering Marion’s latest list o’ brilliance, about how we manage our time, or don’t.

So Amy’s reminder to respond to the call of beauty, to make something, make it beautiful, make it with friends, old and new, is the perfect way for me to take a breath and appreciate what I am doing (instead of what I am not.) I’m not too proud to admit I shed a tear or two of joy and recognition as well. I hope you enjoy Amy’s video and the project it represents as much as I did, and be sure to explore her website for more of her videos and more about her.

What is speaking to you these days? Do you feel a deep calling to create, to write, to reconnect with family or friends? Share your discoveries with your sisters.

(Special thanks to my old friend Gretchen over at The Happiness Project for pointing me in Amy’s direction. Gretchen’s lovely, too.)

No related posts.

There once was a girl from New York,
Whose husband thought she was a dork.
She’d knit without fail
In the snow, sleet and hail,
But come summer, cast off needlework.

OK, SO I’M NOT MUCH OF A POET. Or a limericist. But you get the idea. I absolutely, cannot, CANNOT knit when the weather’s warm. (Though I did once finish a shawl on vacation in Hawaii. But that was when I lived in Los Angeles, and if I wanted to knit, I couldn’t let hot weather stand in my way. Another life, another time.)

Now, come summer, I drop my needles like they’re radioactive, and, apparently, plant a vegetable garden instead. But this summer, right around the time my tomatoes would have been delicious had they not all been killed by the dread late blight, the air turned a touch cool, and I got the urge. Bad.

I dug out the shawl I was supposed to knit, oh, back in March. I’ve got 10 whole rows, which means that by sometime in 2011, I should have something to wear. But in the meantime, I’m loving all the cabling and counting and wasting time enjoying myself over at our Sister Project group on Ravelry. Join us there, if you haven’t already. If you’re new to knitting with the sisters, make sure to visit our roundup of all our writing about knitting. And in the meantime, tell us what you’re up to now that a threat of hint of fall is in the air…

No related posts.

Charlotte Brontë's first sampler

YOU KNOW HOW great it feels when you find a sister (or sister-friend) loves one of your wacky obsessions as much as you do? Well, we’re pretty sure that the Brontës would have shared our obsession with the wonderful opportunities for, um, self-expression through embroidery.

Why? Well, for starters, embroidery as occupation and artform is threaded throughout the works of Charlotte and Emily (and let’s not forget Anne). Needlework was a common occupation for girls in the 19th century (and earlier) and though we’ve read that Emily, in particular, wanted to do just about anything besides pick up needle and thread, it stands to reason that embroidery would figure into their writing. But until recently we didn’t know that examples of their own needlework survive.

Anne, Emily & Charlotte Brontë

All three girls first made simple samplers similar to Charlotte’s, shown above, and then went on to do more complex works–all of them housed at the Brontë Parsonage Museum Haworth, England.

What is it that is so captivating about these plain creations, made by three little girls nearly two centuries ago? I think of my own daughter, learning to embroider a few weeks ago, working so intently to make her tiny stitches line up…and then I think of the wild and free uses of stitchery in our crewelwork slideshow (and the follow-up, here), and I wonder about the discipline and diligence those little Brontës must have needed to stitch those perfect letters and pious verses. No wonder they were not-so-secretly dreaming of Heathcliff and the moors…

If your taste in embroidery runs to the traditional, you could recreate the Brontë girls’ samplers with these kits. Not a needleworker? Pay homage to the Charlotte Brontë with the hand-stenciled T-shirt shown left, available from Etsy seller KM Stitchery (aka Lindsay Keating-Moore.) After all, these sisters, and their work in wool and words, are timeless.

No related posts.

THERE WAS A particular sweater that became the high-water mark of pre-grunge, post-hippie preppy fashion when I was 15. It wasn’t particularly pretty, or soft, or from a status brand. Nope, that sweater fell into fashion because it signified ability, ability to commit and follow through, and having enough free time to do something other than school work, sometimes a rarity in the academic pressure-cooker that was my high school experience. If you, or better, your boyfriend, was wearing this sweater, it meant you were a knitter, and, believe it or not, then as now, that was cool.

I learned to knit along with a couple of friends, by visiting the town’s local yarn store. The women there were extremely tolerant of the influx of adolescent girls (no boys, then, though now, there are plenty of cute, cool guy knitters) fluttering around, fingering yarn and patterns, erupting in mysterious, inside-joke laughter as only teenage girls can.

Those women taught me to knit, and in spite of my best efforts to be self-taught in everything, they succeeded, to a point. (I’m still a little vague on some basic knitting skills, and often find myself referring to references in print and especially, online.) We’d hang out in the store for instruction and inspiration, and then return to our dorms with our projects. It wasn’t uncommon to see groups of us gathered around, knitting in hand, watching afternoon soaps together (the only televisions were in common areas in the dormitories) during our rare down time.

Flash forward more than 25 years (ow, that hurts to type) and I still knit. I still knit in front of the TV, or on long drives where I’m not the driver, or while waiting for my kids to finish an activity that doesn’t require my participation. I have had long hiatuses from the hobby, but I always circle back to it. I love that it keeps my hands busy, that it allows me to be productive even when I’m sitting still, and that is an instant connection to other women.

When I moved to my new, rural home, one of the first things I bonded about with new friends was knitting. We traded patterns. We all played Hat Attack, a knitters’ game of assassin, aka Killer, together. None of us really has time for a regular knitting get-together (and oh, how we long for a Stitch N Bitch to call our own) but we see each other enough–picking up, dropping off, waiting at karate or ballet, grabbing coffee or tea in between–to check in with our projects, and one another.

A few days ago, I was at an ice-skating party with my kids, and another mom slid over to me to ask about the neckwarmer I was wearing. “Did you MAKE that?” she asked.

It’s beautiful, all earthy tans and reds and greens, and though I’d love to take the credit, I had to answer, no, that my friend made it for me because I had so admired hers. “But do you knit?” she persisted. It turned out that she was trying to learn, and what she really wanted to know was if I had a regular knitting group.

I wish I did, because I know how much fun and sisterhood it would offer. (If you don’t believe me, check out TSP’s profile of knitters-extraordinaire Kay Gardiner and Ann Shayne, over in the Galleries.)For now, I have to stick to my fly-by, impromptu knitting sessions, and the virtual knitting sisterhood offered by Ravelry. (If you knit, and you’re not a member–you should be. It’s an amazing community and resource, and you should sign up for the site, and our our little TSP gang there, a group named “TheSisterProjectKnits.”) You’ll even find a few people there still making that long-ago sweater.

No related posts.