The most avid knitters I know came to it early.
“I learned to knit from my grandmother when I was three.”
“My mother taught me when I was very little.”
I have vague memories of my mother teaching me to knit but I never attained anything more complicated than a knit one, purl one rib. My mother, on the other hand, knitted, crocheted, and sewed – our sofa and beds often had a handmade afghan on them. I, as a persnickety child, disdained these handmade items. Because they did not come wrapped in plastic from the store, I was blinded to the craftsmanship embedded in each design and the effort and care in each stitch.
That changed in my junior year in college, when I spent a year in Germany as an exchange student. Upon arrival, I spent the summer at the Goethe Institut in Goettingen. I was taking a German immersion course to rapidly increase my German language skills in preparation for my Fall semester at the Universitaet Mannheim. All the Goethe Institut students received housing scattered among the local university students. The dorms were a hodgepodge of nationalities and I quickly found my own multinational circle of friends. Among them was a full time student from Lebanon, Haleh, who was completing university in Goettingen along with her older sister and younger brother. Their parents had sent them out of the country to protect them from the escalating conflict of the mid 1980’s. Haleh, remembering the pain of being transplanted to a foreign country, quickly took me under her wing and became my main tutor for the German language and adapting to German life. We could only speak German together and that forced me to accelerate my speaking skills.
What I noticed quickly all around me, however, was that everyone knitted. It seemed all the college girls were wearing colorful Icelandic sweaters they had knit themselves. And no crappy acrylic either. Everything was natural wool or some other natural fiber. I started noticing girls and women knitting on buses, subways, and on trains. It seemed that knitting needles were poking out of each backpack and tote I saw. Nights around the TV (where there were only three stations with 15 minute commercial breaks) seemed to require that each female present whip out their current knitting project. And it didn’t matter if they were German, French, Scandinavian, or Lebanese, like Haleh. It wasn’t long before I asked Haleh to teach me to knit. And of course, she agreed. She started me straight on circular needles ( for portability, she said since women took their knitting projects everywhere) and that’s a habit I have carried through to this day. My first project? A red turtleneck sweater in wool I picked up at the local department store, where a rich variety of yarns could be found every day.
My sweater was knit in basic stockinette with drop shoulders. Square body, basic sleeves, sewn together like material (no mattress stitch) and with a “knit one, purl one” rib for the sleeve cuffs and neck. I was immensely proud of it. Just finishing it gave me a sense of accomplishment that seems hard to attain in something so simple nowadays. It came down to a realization so basic and satisfying.
With just a single strand of yarn and two needles, I could make things I could wear.
At the time, it seemed rather miraculous. Before long, I was picking up monthly issues of Stricken (knitting in German), Nicole, and Brigitte – all magazines chock full of knitting patterns.
My second project was a multi-colored Norwegian sweater made out of an alpaca blend wool I found and fell in love with at a local store. Perhaps a foreshadowing of things to come? At that time, I had no idea what an alpaca was but I knew I loved the plush handle of the yarn. That sweater was gorgeous, but turned out way too large for me. I had yet to master the patience of doing a good test swatch for gauge. Years later, I gave it as a gift to a much taller friend, Renee, who loved it and actually borrowed it to wear when we toured Vienna together. The important thing, after all, was that it be worn.
When I returned to the States, I lived for quite a while off those last few German knitting magazines I had brought home with me. Reading knitting patterns, as any knitter knows, is akin to learning a new language with the myriad abbreviations and terms. I had learned in German and in metric and the effort of relearning everything in English just seemed to cumbersome. For a long while, I didn’t pick up a needle at all.
When I started breeding alpacas, I rediscovered my love of knitting and finally dug up my old circular needles. Alpacas have motivated me to learn how to knit in English (though I still think of needle sizes in metric), to puzzle my way through a whole new set of acronyms, and expand my skills beyond what I learned in Germany. Sweaters are still my favorite item to knit though I have a rising fondness for socks. When I knit (which is almost always in alpaca nowadays), I often think about that first alpaca sweater I did over twenty years ago. I’ll have to ask Renee if she still has it and if she still loves it. I often think of Haleh with regret, as someone with whom I lost touch long ago through nothing but lack of effort. I wonder what she is doing, whether she and her sister and brother ever returned home, if she knows how much her support and help meant to me when I was that lost American student, freshly landed in a country with an inadequate vocabulary but boundless determination. I would point her to my website which shows the sweaters I have made just recently, but all have their roots in that first red turtleneck.
And I still marvel at the simple premise of a knit garment that can manifest itself in so many beautiful and varied ways.
One strand of yarn.
Two needles.
Endless possibilities.
The Pacablogger 