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.

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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…

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A knitted poem project contribution, from London knit shop Prick Your Finger

FROM THE “OH, HOW WE WISH we’d thought of that” files comes this project, both inspired and oddly moving: the knitted poem. Yes, a poem. Rendered letter by fastidious letter in knitted squares.

Hundreds of knitters around the world are taking part, and the whole project is the brainchild of England’s Poetry Society. Director Judith Palmer was quoted in the UK newspaper The Guardian as saying, “A poem is often a small thing that packs a larger punch than its scale suggests–it’s not big and shouty.”

We couldn’t agree more; as you probably know by now, we love poetry precisely for its ability to make enormous connections in a few carefully-chosen words. We also love knitting (though summer is a slow time for me, at least, on the needles), and Margaret, well…Margaret doesn’t knit at all. (But that’s another story.) We think Palmer said it perfectly: “With poetry and with knitting, you work line by line, and if something goes wrong you have to unravel it.”

The poem that will be spelled out from the knitted alphabet is a secret, known only to a select few. If you were going to have a poem, writ large, in the craft of your own hand, what would you choose? Let us know, and don’t forget to check back–as soon as the secret is revealed, we’ll be sure to report it.

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There must be another way...

NOW THAT SPRING seems to have really and truly sprung, even in the frigid Northeast where I live, I am struggling not just with finishing my knitting projects, but with getting them started, at all. I blame the garden.

This year, I’m trying, I really am, to make something of the space between my front porch and the street. When my mother decided to move in with us, she held out a carrot: She’d help me plant a garden, yet another skill set she possesses and I (utterly) lack. (My husband will gleefully tell strangers in the nursery that I have a black thumb. Now that’s true love.)

Indeed, bit by bit, row by row, a garden seems to be emerging. Where I once had just lawn, I have raised beds full of rich black earth. Packets of seed crowd my kitchen counter, and I even have tiny green seedlings unfurling toward grow lights from their wee pots in my basement. I am, it seems, finally going to grow something.

But what I am not going to do, now that my rare free time is spent pulling dandelions and misting seed trays, is actually get this cast on. Read that again, and let me be clear: I haven’t even finished casting on. Granted it’s 176 stitches wide, and the needles fine, the yarn even finer…but–nothing. Is it possible that I am destined to be just a foul-weather knitter? Have any of you achieved a balance between growing things in the earth and growing fabric on your needles? I’m looking for help, sisters. (And if you haven’t yet joined our Sister Project group on Ravelry, where this lovely shawl is our next knitalong…clearly, you’ve got plenty of time to join in!)

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I HAVE MENTIONED BEFORE that I have a problem with finishing. When it comes to knitting, this tricky admission has a double meaning. I have more unfinished knitting projects lurking around my office than I care to count, or even see, and part of the reason I don’t finish them is because I don’t like finishing, that is, the tasks of weaving in ends, sewing seams and blocking that are critical to a successful sweater, or even, for that matter a purse. (And trust me, I am  highly motivated by purses. I LOVE purses.) The problems started, along with the knitting, back in high school. I’d like to blame those nice ladies at the local yarn store, but I expect I just wasn’t paying attention.

I’ve always liked diving into projects more than I cared, really, about how they turned out. I am not, it turns out, as much of a perfectionist as I might like, and I am able to reap a whole lot of enjoyment from “doing,” without caring much about the outcome.

I fear that this is the hallmark of a selfish knitter. That so-called sweater above? That’s my response to the Rock’s request, sweetly and politely made two years ago, for a purple hoodie. Well, purple, yes, but hoodie? We’ll see. There’s a whole lot of knitting to be done before anything resembling a hood appears.

This is like the baby blanket I began 10 years ago for the daughter-to-be of one sister-friend that ended up going four years later to another. And meanwhile, I pretend not to see all that soft purple yarn lying forlornly under my desk (it’s right next to my knees, even as I type this) and instead think lustful thoughts for the teal blue alpaca that’s waiting for me downstairs, partially cast on to begin this incredible shawl.

Is there a cure for this disease? I’m hoping that the sisterhood over on our Ravelry group can help, but I’m looking for suggestions from other knitter/crafter/project-y types: How in the world do you finish everything you start?

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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.

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