Knitted with magic…

I knit a lot. I find it calms me, brings me back to my body, and reminds me that life is best lived as a tactile, tangible, felt experience. For me, it is a meditation of the hands. Consequently, I’m not the kind of knitter whose pleasure arrives in the completion, but more in the process. Sure, I like to make beautiful garments… fine soft red lace that drapes elegantly over shoulders, snuggly soft swathes that envelop in warmth and in love, close-fitting rib in cashmere, merino and silk that lay close to the lines and the curves of the body beneath. But what I love most is the feel of the yarn held with just the right tension, my bamboo needles in either hand, and the rhythmic dance of yarn, needle and hands as they create a fall of fabric that gathers on my lap.

So, I tend to give away a lot of what I knit. I love gifting it to another. Handing over the shawl or the jumper or the bootees or the wrist-warmers that began life as a single strand of spun fibre, and which, with time and love and skill and attention and patience, was woven into form, is a lovely thing indeed. Especially when the one receiving knows the effort that has been poured into the endeavour, and doesn’t equate it with something deemed to be “similar” and bought off the high street.

Which brings me to my current knit…

Last week, I looked out some charcoal grey 100% wool yarn from my stash (which lives in multiple bags crammed beneath my dressing table in my bedroom), and started knitting a man’s jumper. My original intention was to knit it for my husband, but my daughter recently knitted him a jumper, so I started thinking that maybe I was knitting it for somebody else. And then I made a mistake in my pattern-reading. I began knitting a large size, but by the end of knitting the back, I was knitting the extra-large size. I sat and counted out my stitches, disbelieving that I could have made such a mistake. I’ve read patterns for decades and I don’t think I’ve ever made this particular error. But yes, I had indeed knitted a combination of two sizes.

I smoothed out the piece of knitted charcoal fabric with my hands, and wondered what to do next. Should I rip it all back down and start again? Was it salvageable? Or do I just set it to one side and start something new?

As I felt the slightly crunchy texture of the wool beneath my hands, it dawned on me that, as long as I made the same mistake on the front, and knitted the sleeves in the extra-large size, then the pieces would still fit together. It certainly wasn’t the disaster I had feared. The difference in the sizes wasn’t that radical, after all. Maybe it would be ok…

So, I kept knitting, casting on the stitches for the front in the large size, before switching, once again to the instructions for the extra large size.

However, as I was knitting yesterday, it dawned on me that I am now knitting a man’s jumper in a size that doesn’t fit any man I know. I am knitting a gift with no intended recipient. Which has led me to wonder who this jumper is meant for….

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At the beginning of December, I got sick. I came down with an infection that I am, unfortunately, particularly prone to, and was promptly placed on a course of strong antibiotics. While the medication was effective, it also made me feel – as it always does – decidedly not right. I felt off balance, headachey, and nauseous. Which, in turn, left me prone on my red sofa, wrapped in my red blanket, feeling really rather sorry for myself.

To distract myself from my self-pity, I followed a link about fairy tales that a good friend had recommended, and found myself working through the free first class of a course about stories and archetypes and writing. 3 of my favourite things. In the class, we are guided to explore a “picture” – what we see in our imagination when we think of the phrase “fairy tale”. And from there, the wonderful teacher Michelle Tocher leads us deeper into the experience as we follow the threads our picture offers us to see where they might lead and what they might tell us about ourselves.

My picture featured a knitter. The sister from the story The Six Swans, who collects the nettles which she spins into yarn, before knitting it up into magical shirts to transform her lost brothers from their ensorcelled swan-form back to human. For some reason, this is the story that came to me while the medication coursed through my bloodstream and my brain felt foggy and strange. And while in this altered (altared) state, I realised that, in all the times that I had heard and told this story, I hadn’t really pictured her as a knitter before. A collector of the nettles? Yes. A spinner of the fibre? Yes. But a knitter? No… Perhaps it is because of an illustration I once saw years ago that showed her sewing up the fabric, that I didn’t piece together that she and I have something in common. We knit magic into our garments before we give them away…

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Which takes me back to this extra-large jumper. I still don’t know who it’s for. My own brother, perhaps. Although I fear it may swamp him as it’s probably 2 sizes too large for him. But I do know that it’s knitted with magic. Woven into every turn and twist of yarn. Maybe the swans will tell me…