Join Me in Snarkville

Last year, I went to hear Stephanie Pearl-McPhee speak. She said something that stuck with me and rolled around in my head until finally there is room for the blog post to push forward.

Paraphrase of what she said: “If I hear one more time ‘This isn’t your grandmother’s knitting.’ I’m going to ask ‘How do you figure and why are your insulting my grandmother?’ My grandmother was a damn fine knitter and this *IS* her knitting.”

Oh, there was more about the connectedness of knitting to our past and the importance of it all. But the part that just rolled around in my head is that this knitting thing I do. This pulling string into knots making fabric. This thing IS no different than what my grandmother, my great grandmother and even her mother did. There’s probably a few grandfathers along the way who knit a bit too — but I am not sure. But the part I’m not saying is that shorty after I heard those words, my grandmother passed away.

I’ve tried to pull this together for something close to six months and never could. At first, I thought it was because death and family are personal and the dealing with it is personal. Then time passed and I didn’t have words for it. I would go through my days and weeks and have a nagging thought and I kept pushing it back. I thought (or tried to convince myself) that I was honoring what my family would have wanted by not announcing it to the world — and I may have been. But there is something to be said, and finally I shall.

My grandmother could knit. This was a fact I never knew until I was an adult, married, and moved far away. In fact, she never told me she could knit until she knew I knit. Yes, by that point she had long put down her needles and once we spoke of it she toyed with picking them up again. But that wouldn’t have been my grandmother. She did countless amazing things in her life and unless you we lucky enough to have been there or she happened to mention it along the way, you may never have known. In this, I believe she may have been the most modest and humble of people I’ve ever met.

[Major Important Sidenote: As I've aged and grown up, I have realized that I've learned so much about some of my family after their death than I did when they were alive. Queen Mum and I have spoken lots in the last few months that children never get to know their parents until they clean out the house and then so many of the questions that the items bring up o unanswered. Mind you, not my grandmother's house, because she labeled everything; if there was a question left unanswered it was 'why did you keep THIS?' I'm not 100% sure how you avoid this, but I'm toying sitting down with my parents and video camera and making them spill it all; though I'm pretty sure, "So, tell me what I'm going to learn and want to question you about after your death is both morbid and not the way to start a good conversation." But Queen Mum and I have spoken and if we figure it out, we will share.]

But back to the knitting. She told me of a dress she knit. She knit it after seeing them in Neimens’ for more than she would spend and she figured she could make it. It was a navy dress made of ribbon yarn. She would pet my wraps or my felted handbag and tell me how nice. Knowing now, how knitters are — I could see she had the knitting heart. She could see the details and to her the details were important — thus a knitter.

I’m pretty sure she knit a sweater or two, a dress, and even a mohair wrap. None of those items survived the years for probably a ton of reasons — none of which were that she didn’t knit well.

At Thanksgiving, my mother pulled me aside and showed me a box she’d found. It was what was left of my grandmother’s knitting. There were straight needles, but I don’t like straight needles — so I let them go. There were pieces of yarn — nothing more than bits — I let them go. There was a scrap of the ribbon dress — I want to believe it was her swatch and proof that she was a more patient and smarter knitter than I — I let it go. There were patterns for unknown things — all handwritten in another person’s script and her notes in the margins — I let them go. There were tools — I held those aside, I’m a sucker for tools. There was some cotton yarn in peach and white, knitted….I dug more. I found a finished dishcloth. I found another one just begun. I found the pattern.

This is *MY* grandmother’s knitting. And I’m proud to have it and to finish the work she began.