Heritage

I have recently found myself in a surplus of “baby” yarn left over from baby showers and baby-doll-loving cousins. There are four balls of bulky white and blue yarns and a half of a skein of this very thin, soft yellow yarn. In the daze following the completion of the bubbly crocheted piece, I realized I had seen that particular shade of yellow somewhere before.

Yellow.  (Yes, I did feel like Arthur Dent for a while.)

The weight of the yarn intrigued me as well. The baby blanket my grandmother had crocheted for me was yellow, but it wasn’t that fine of a yarn.

Then it hit me. It wasn’t my baby blanket, it wasn’t made by my grandmother and it wasn’t crocheted.

It was a baby blanket made by my great grandmother and it was knit. Though I’m not sure when it appeared there or for whom it was made, I found it safely tucked away in my mother’s linen closet one afternoon and became instantly enamored by it. She had made it in a tight gauge with squares; yellow borders around white stockinette spaces with sheep drawn in embroidery with black yarn.

Generally I don’t think that stockinette makes for a good blanket and embroidering a pattern onto it I like even less. You see both sides of a blanket, and there is no way to make the back side of an embroidered stockinette anything look pretty.

So why do I like this blanket?

Honestly, the fact that my great grandmother made it plays a big role. Also, no matter how hideously unlike the front the back may be, it is at least neat. The sheer cuteness of the little lambs doesn’t hurt, either.

Remembering that blanket, I went to my cup of many knitting needles and pulled out a pair of size 2  and just started knitting up a swatch of the yellow yarn.

It was a perfect match. I didn’t even have to look.

There is no way to describe how I felt, holding those knitting needles and that swatch in my hands. I had knitted with my mom before. I had crocheted with my grandma. My great grandmother left this world before I ever had the chance to do needlework with her but in that moment it was as if she were right there beside me clinking her needles together and crunching on an ice cube with me.

 

Goals

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my long life of consistently NOT setting goals, it’s that it is EXCEEDINGLY difficult to nigh IMPOSSIBLE to achieve something by accident. I would go so far as to say that “accidental achievement” should not only qualify as an oxymoron, it should define the category.

It took me a long time to figure this out. (What can I say? I learn the hard way.)

This year I’m turning my life around. I will refuse to sit around and wait for good things to come my way and I will NOT  just throw effort into something without thinking it through or planning.

I want to lose weight.

I looked up what my weight should be according to my body mass index. I’m dieting and exercising in a healthy and well-researched manner so as to lose my goal amount. I’m also charting my success. This not only helps me to stay true to my dietary restrictions and claims of increased exercise, but it also helps me track my success. It always feels good when I can write down that another five pounds have melted away seemingly overnight. (Does anyone else find that weird? Days pass by and absolutely no difference… then boom! and goodbye five pounds? Is fat/water weight quantized? If you’re smiling at /disgusted by the misuse of scientific terms, congrats! you’re a physics nerd.)

I want to knit hats.

The key to my success was NOT, as I claimed in my earlier post, that I cheated. Yes, starting at the top allowed me to feel more comfortable about when I was going to start/stop the rounding of the top of the hat. My greatest problem in the past, I knew, had been in deciding where that critical point should fall. It wasn’t always that the hats weren’t wide enough; but I invariably started closing the hat too soon. Starting at the top allowed me to discover this for myself without fear of failure.

The cheating? It was necessary, too. For any of you non-knitters who might be reading this, it is not easy to start knitting outward from a single point; it looks messy and loose and wrong. Crocheting the center is the only way I can think of starting a knit hat at the top without leaving an awkward point. (Knitting from a point, neatly, would require a narrow tube which slowly expands in a conical manner.)

Now that my confidence has been restored and my method proven, I just need to polish it. My next hat (*cross fingers*) will be successfully knit from the bottom up. There will be row counting. Gauge will be considered in all things. I will make minor improvements in the rate of increases, as there is an odd last little bump of an increase that looks like an afterthought (because it was). Thankfully, that is filled out when the hat is worn.

I want to become a better writer.

Guess what actions I’m taking to reach that goal! Yeah, that’s right. This blog isn’t entirely innocent. I’m not writing this every day because I want to; not because I have something to say every day, and certainly not because I enjoy sharing my thoughts on things. I write to keep in practice and to explore my voice. My old friend and I haven’t seen one another in a while.