Patron Saints of Knitting

Saint Jacqui of eternal knowledge, good cheer, spare size 4's  and PATIENCE... (oh...such patience)... in her shop, This Is Knit, Dublin

.... and Saint Lisa of all the above too, who is also about to present the world with a new knitting target ...

.... and not pictured here (only because I couldn't corner any more today) is the rest of the host of This Is Knit to whom I (and many more) owe an awful lot of knitting thanks and praise...   And in fact I have no idea how I got through a whole week of posting without mentioning them.  They don't just have the most beautiful yarns, craft accoutrements and ideas, but they're also great sports while being doorstepped for photos in the middle of their lunchtime rush!

The Point

…this is Faith by Louisa Harding and I knit it for Adrienne, friend and fellow warrior of the female state, for her 50th birthday.  Although she lives at the other side of the world, and has weathered trials that would flatten most people, she still managed to provide an awful lot of those “unquantifiable cooperative links that make life bearable” (see quotes) in my life.

“What the knitter sets out to knit is not necessarily what he or she ends up knitting, and sometimes that works out well". 

“A series of seemingly inconsequential actions eventually amount to something substantial, no matter how imperfect…”

“Knitting is a metaphor for the unquantifiable cooperative links that make lives bearable, but which may also elude overly logical analysis…"

“A knitted item is an unsung song of time, work, persistence, and above all of love and good intentions… “

“An Attempt to Examine Knitting Psychology”  K. Duggan

Couldn’t have put better myself actually.

It Was Acceptable In The Eighties

The amount of cackling I was doing over what we once considered gorgeous drew attention one evening from my twenty-year-old son and his friends.  To my astonishment, they were wildly impressed in general, but specifically with jacket no 28 to the right below and my son launched a campaign to have me make him one.     

And as it happened, I had been knitting exactly one of these for his father while giving birth to his older brother and had stuck in a jagged graph line of my live perception of a labour pain in darkest black along the back to make a point I felt needed recording that night.  So I thought the pattern might be sufficiently etched on my brain to give it a try all these years later, but that yarn wasn't to be got anymore... and nothing I could see was going to work easily with that pattern... and creating my own seemed a bit of a reach... but eventually I made a very rough job of an approximation of what he wanted - and for good measure, a sweater for my son's life-long friend and my godson too.

... and it's a measure of what all-round nice guys they've grown up to be that they seemed to like them in spite of their manifold enormous flaws - very much in the spirit of knitting, and I can't think of a better wish for both of them that they hold onto their glass-half-full outlook in life and let nothing take that away from them!