Shortly after I moved to Portland, I met my first knitting friend. We moved into this chic new apartment building in Buckman. We were only there about a month when I met Janet. Janet was moving in with her little dog, Charlie. They moved just across the hall from us, so we helped them carry boxes and held doors and started talking. She’s an older woman with two sons and an eye for aesthetic resonance in buildings and people.
I had been knitting for about two years at the time, but I wasn’t yet very adventurous in colorwork, color choices, pattern variations, or even cables. I didn’t deviate too far from hats and cowls and very simple shawlettes. At the time, Janet was just getting back into knitting after a many year hiatus. She was knitting these little new born and preemie hats that local area hospitals were collecting. Janet is a monogamous knitter, so she had a little basket full of yarn and the few hats she had already made.
I loved her project and had done something similar the year before over Christmas break with my mom. We had knit a few Red Hats for Preemies. Janet and I started talking about knitting and the experience of knitting with other women. She was going through a rather disruptive and traumatizing split from a boyfriend. At first we only chatted in the hallway when we ran into each. Pretty soon we started walking up the stairs or taking the elevator up after I was coming home from teaching at a local community college and after she was done walking Charlie. Eventually, I’d walk with her to her apartment where we’d sit on her turquoise velvet couch and talk about men and love and knitting.
It seemed natural when we progressed to knitting together. I’d walk across the hall in my slippers, knitting in hand. Hours past before I realized how long I had been knitting and talking, and cuddling with Charlie.
Janet had picked out this cowl pattern she wanted to knit and asked me if I wanted to knit the same pattern. I’m just happy to knit, it doesn’t much matter to me what I’m knitting necessarily. She picked out the pattern and the yarn. I bought the same yarn so we could talk about the experience knitting with it. We cast-on a pattern called Getting Warmer, a slouchy cowl with neck and shoulder shaping.
Though I had knit in the round quite a bit, I was unaware of a little knitting issue I now know as jog. Jog is the pesky element of knitting in the round where, when using garter stitch or color stripes, the working row doesn’t line up with the row below. It’s visible at the beginning of the round, because knitting is actually helical and requires some adjustment for that component. Jog drives me absolutely bonkers.
I think I probably tinked back and ripped out at least four times. I changed my my tension, speculating that that might be causing the malalignment. After starting for the 5th time, I gave up and decided the FO wouldn’t be anything I wore anyway, and the colorway I had chosen would make this a poor gift for my mom, who might actually be someone interested in wearing the FO.
With the yarn in mind, I looked for more intriguing patterns that would be enjoyable knits, teach me something new, and also showcase simplicity of the yarn but compelling colorway.
Almost immediately, I cast-on Quick Oats, a top down raglan sweater for kids. I loved the double entendre of the pattern name. I’m kind of a sucker for tongue and cheek. It knit up, just as the name implies, very quickly. Since this was my first sweater, I was anxious to see what the next direction would be and how it would take shape in my knitting. Dividing for the sleeves came easier than I anticipated. Because I had never made a garment, I was forced to read ahead in the pattern. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that prior to this piece, I had just cast-on, not giving a thought to reading ahead in the directions or getting a sense for how the pattern directions would be expressed in the object.
I’m very infrequently a selfish knitter. Most of my knits end up as gifts. I originally thought of my best friend and her wife while knitting this. They had been trying to have a baby by various attempts at IUI. I imaged myself sending this to them as a gift for their baby. But the baby never came. While I was knitting, my friend and I shared the grief of trying to conceive. We laughed for hours about their in-home and at-clinic attempts at IUI. If there is no humor to be found during these times, the soul might not be able to survive.
I never sent the sweater, even after they were able to adopt earlier this year. The sweater had been so much a part of me by then. There is a rather large, rather obvious mistake in the back where I dropped a stitched and tried to patch it together, before I knew about the construction of stitches and how to fix mistakes as I go.
It’s imperfect but it’s mine. If I’m really honest, I keep this FO because it represents the kind of knitter I am today. Knitting this sweater taught me that I could knit a larger, adult-sized sweater. It also helped me understand stitch construction and design elements that I appreciate in other works, too.
