My Knitting

     I've often wondered when and where knitting first began, so just now I stopped to google it.  The simple answer is, nobody knows.  It is supposed that it started in the 6th century, but maybe not until medieval times. 

     I do know when I first learned to knit.  My mother taught me when I was about eight years old.  I remember she unraveled an old, red, worn sweater and I proceeded to make a scarf for my brother Don, three years my senior.  I thought I was pretty hot stuff as I knit away in garter stitch.  My  biggest trouble was that I knew so little that I couldn't always tell if a bunch of strands was only one stitch or if it were two or three.  Hence my finished scarf had enough curves to vie with the most voluptuous woman around.  My brother utterly refused to wear it.

     For a brilliant woman (a fact of which on rare instances I perceive a hint of proof) it's amazing to me that it took me half a century to realize snug, smooth knitting stitches both look and wear much better than loose uneven ones.  I blamed my untidiness on my continental, or right-handed, knitting style. I'm getting better.  The holes in the dish cloth I happen to be napping over in the above picture are there on purpose for the design.  

     My mother-in-law taught me to crochet, but that's another story.  Between the two, I've finished and given away many times more articles than I have ever written and edited, yet I claim to be a writer. 

     There just might be another someone out there who's weird enough to have taken a challenge to stockpile enough hand-knit or crocheted dish cloths to give one to each and every person who is kind enough to attend my funeral.  I just don't know how many that will take.  However, I'm optimistic (and have lots of relatives) and already have about four hundred sixty tucked away and waiting. Enough where I've at least slowed down. Crazy?  Of course.  But it's a fun challenge.  It also gives me a false sense of comfort -- of achieving busyness when I don't really want to clean house, or write.