Read Stitch 'n Bitch: The Knitter's Handbook Online
Authors: Debbie Stoller
Stitch 'n Bitch: The Knitter's Handbook (2 page)
The Go-Everywhere, Go-with-Everything Cardigan
Queen of Hearts and Wonder Woman Bikinis
DIY Tote Bag and Iron-on Patch
Circular Knitting Needle Holder
part one
Take Back the Knit
WHY YOUNG WOMEN ARE TAKING UP KNITTING ONCE MORE
My grandmother sits, straight-backed, in the living-room chair, her feet planted firmly on the floor in front of her. As always, her hands are in motion—constantly in motion—as her knitting needles go back and forth, yarn feeding through her hands from a ball that unwinds slowly at her side. My grandmother’s hands are old and so smooth they seem to have had the fingerprints worn off them. Her sister, my great-aunt Jo, sits beside her, tatting lace onto the edge of a handkerchief. My mother and Aunt Hetty work on their own embroidery projects, and, along with the other aunts and uncles who are visiting, all of the adults are engaged in a lively conversation, punctuated by rounds of hearty laughter. Too young to join in the grown-ups’ discussion, I sit on a small stool, quietly eating cake. After all, this is a birthday party.
My mother met my dad and moved to America when she was twenty-four, but for most of my childhood we spent our summers back in Holland with her relatives. Between my grandmother and her eight sisters, and my mom and her two sisters, there were always aunts and great-aunts around. Women filled every room. And whenever the relatives were gathered together, the women’s hands were always working. With very few exceptions, and with barely any attention paid to what was going on below their elbows, the women would be busy knitting or sewing, darning or tatting. It didn’t so much matter what they were making—after all, what purpose is served by hand-tatted lace sewn on the edge of a handkerchief?—as long as their hands remained in motion, for, as my grandmother used to say, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”
But there was something else behind all this activity as well. The handwork of my grandmother and great-aunts seemed to provide comfort and serenity. Seated at these family gatherings, their purposeful motions gave them a focused air of self-containment, an earthy solidity. They were, after all, women who had learned their crafts as children, and who had practiced these skills throughout their lives—before and after the birth of children, the loss of husbands, and through two world wars. Their knitting was as regular and rhythmic as their breathing, as familiar as the feel of their own skin, and just as much a part of them.
My grandmother and her sisters were too humble to consider their work “expressions of their creativity.” They were craftspeople, plain and simple, who were capable of taking on the most complex of knitting projects but who, for the most part, were content to keep themselves working on functional items whose patterns they knew by heart. From the time she first learned to knit, at age six, my grandmother was responsible for knitting socks to cover each of the thirty feet in her family. “In the evenings, the boys were free to do anything they liked,” she once told me, with a lingering tinge of resentment, “but all the girls had to sit and knit.” Later on in her life she made more extravagant items, including a fanciful knit suit in a beautiful, dusty-rose-colored nubby yarn, which my aunt still talks about to this day. But my grandmother always returned to her sock knitting. Even in her nineties, when her eyesight began to fail, she could still turn out perfect pairs of socks—the memory of their creation so well worn into her hands that she could knit them practically by feel alone. My grandmother’s hand-knit socks are still the only thing my father ever wears on his feet.
My grandmother, age twenty-one, poses with her parents, eight sisters, and four brothers, 1920. A knitter since the age of six, she was responsible for knitting socks to cover the thirty feet in her family.
My first, unsuccessful, knitting attempts.
My grandmother shows me (age twenty) the ropes once more.
In my grandmother’s time, knitting was not just a way to keep one’s hands busy—it was also a way to save money. When my mother was small, it was standard practice to buy yarn and knit a sweater for a child, then, a year or so later, unravel and reknit it, with a bit more yarn, when the child had outgrown the original. Then there was the time, during the Second World War, that my grandmother had to unravel an old cotton bedspread—which her own mother had knit—to make underwear for her children. My mother still remembers sitting on uncomfortably hard wooden school benches, the bumpy side of the knit underwear leaving marks on her behind.
In America my mother carried on the frugal family tradition and made almost all of the clothes my brother and I wore. “Those girls are handy with a needle and thread,” my grandmother would often say, proudly, about her daughters. The sight of my mother’s heavy gray sewing machine set up at the end of the dining table was so familiar to me that it almost seemed like another sibling, and when she wasn’t sewing, she was knitting, or embroidering. Walking through a department store, my mother would often finger the material on an item of clothing, then check the price tag and sniff, “I could make that myself.” A few weeks later, I’d be presented with a hand-knit sweater or dress that was virtually indistinguishable from the store-bought variety.
Spending summers at Aunt Hetty’s house in Holland as a child, I was in awe of the beautiful tapestries she had made using a combination of appliqué and embroidery, and, of course, she also sewed and knit. And then there was her homemade jewelry—long strands of pink and purple glass beads that hung around her neck and dangled from her ears. On rainy days, when Aunt Hetty would set me up at her kitchen table with scraps of yarn, colorful beads, and embroidery floss left over from her projects, I’d feel like Hansel and Gretel arriving at a house made of candy. Only in my fairy tale, there was no witch and nothing to fear.
My earliest attempts at knitting were a disaster. At the age of five, I remember fumbling with a pair of aluminum needles and the squeaky pink acrylic yarn my mother had given me to practice with. My sweaty, dirty child hands made the needles sticky and slowly turned the yarn from light pink to gray. No matter how hard I tried to get the loops to appear in nice, orderly rows the way my mother had shown me, I couldn’t do it. My yarn would get tangled up, my stitches would fall off the needles, and I’d give up in frustration. That’s when my mother would take the work from me—“These needles are so sticky”—gently put the fallen stitches back on the needles, straighten up the few stray loops I had managed to make, and hand the mini torture device back to me. But I never got any better at it, and the needles and yarn would be put away until the next time.