Friday, January 07, 2011

A return to my knitting roots...



















In early Fall of 2004, my oldest son was just turning 1, and I found out I was pregnant with baby #2 on his first birthday. For some reason, I decided that I wanted to relearn to knit, and that I wanted to knit a pumpkin hat for my little boy so he could be a pumpkin for Halloween. I went to a yarn shop (sadly now defunct) and took a fruit hat class. I learned that I twisted my stitches (which I have since corrected), I learned to cast on, knit in the round, knit on DPKs, do basic color stranding, decreases....I learned a lot in those two classes, and I fell in love with knitting.

When my younger son was born, he was *really* jaundiced and ended up in the NICU at Children's in Boston for 6 days. It's devastating that Children's is needed, but I'm so glad it's there. When I started this blog, I was knitting baby hats for the NICU. That ended up being...not a fulfilling experience. It's not that I was looking for thanks or glory, but it felt like I was sending things off into a black hole, not knowing if they were being used or thrown away. I never received a single acknowledgement of any of the things I donated, so...I stopped.

Since then, I've struggled with feeling like it's okay to knit just for me, for those I love. I've knit a few hats for the homeless, here and there, but nothing on any sort of regular basis.

Anyway, to make a long and perhaps pointless story longer, recently a FB friend who is a photographer posted that she was looking for cute newborn hats, handknit, so I offered to make her a couple. It's purely selfish - I can start (and finish) a new project without guilt that I'm not working on all my other projects! And, I have a bit of yarn, you know. So I pulled out the Tahki cotton classic that I just *happened* to have lying around, wound it up and cast on. I can't actually lay hands on the hat pattern, so I just did it from memory. Size 6 needles (KP Options for Magic Loop, of course), c/o 64 stitches. Knit 5", started the top. I realized half-way through the decreases that Ann Norling doesn't decrease every other row, if I recall correctly, she decreases every row, so my green is a bit pointier than hers. No worries, I think it's cute.

1 comment:

maria said...

awww. this is super cute and reminds me of a hat my friend jefferson made for nicolena when she was a baby (i think his was a tomato though).

re: the NICU hats - when nicolena was born at Mt. Auburn they gave her an adorable hand knit hat and said something airily like "oh, we have these little old ladies who love to knit these for us." so i never felt like the hat really came from SOMEONE, but for what it's worth she wore it home from the hospital and i've treasured it ever since - the primary image in my head of her as a newborn is a photo of her in that hat....and it's in her little keepsake hatbox with the tomato hat, baptism dress and etc. i'd be willing to bet that a lot of those hats that you sent off are similarly tucked away.