I have really not been up to much at all, recently. Every project I’m working on looks much the same as when I posted about it last. I’m determined that this blog won’t become my diary (for the most part), which does it make it tough to come up with fresh content if I haven’t finished anything recently or binged on more books.
I got to thinking why I became a knitter, then. Working with fiber runs in my family, with my maternal great-grandmother who lived up in the hills of West Virginia keeping me occupied on vacation with making endless finger-crocheted cords. She was a magnificent quilter, too. I particularly recall this quilt that lay on my mother’s old bed at the house(she and my uncle were mostly raised by my great-grandmother), and I would sneak in there and trace the pieces in the patchwork. I can quilt, a little, but that art stuck mostly with my mother. I think, then, that the root of my interest started with crochet. I don’t remember when I first actually held a hook, but I know it was much later.
My maternal grandmother made crocheted afghans that I admired whenever I was at her house in Maryland. Thinking back, the color combinations enthralled me and I would spend hours considering how each color somehow worked with the next color in the next row. I never actually saw her crochet, but she also quilted (pretty sure she made a stained-glass looking cover for the diamond-shaped window in her front door…I wonder where that went when she passed away), and made gorgeously detailed ribbon flowers.
My mom is a talented quilter, although I don’t know if she’d agree with me if you asked her that. I’ve seen her crochet a bit, and I know she can knit, but knitting seems to mostly be my thread in the tapestry of my family’s fiber history.
I had a pretty solid background in crochet (especially when I finally stopped with the finger-crochet chains and learned how to make a solid fabric), but I had a sudden need to knit. That particular bug in my ear happened in high school, but I couldn’t tell you the catalyst for that, to be honest. I started learning with Stitch N’ Bitch, but somehow missed a crucial step in the knit stitch technique and twisted literally all my knit stitches for years. I don’t know many other knitters in real-life so I had no idea I was twisting them until I knit a sweater with a cable straight down the front that insisted on wrapping itself around me like a snake. Once I figured that out, it all started to come together, and I haven’t stopped knitting since. Aside from brief stints of crochet (still the only technique I’ll use for an afghan), and weaving. Speaking of weaving, still working on my most recent bag, but unfortunately due to COVID-19 I won’t be selling them at the gallery this December. They ended up closing for a month and have had to shift all the scheduled shows by a month to make up the time, and the December sale in the Member’s gallery got bumped. Oh, well. Time to put more work in to my Etsy, then.