continental knitting

I've been an keen knitter since I was a little girl. I first learned to cast on with my Mum, who in turn had learned from her mother and so on, and so forth. Going into my teens, I started getting unwell with Chronic Fatigue/Fibromylagia. As time went on, I would spend more and more time off school, and was often looked after by Grandma Joan. I would spend many an afternoon sat knitting beside her or rummaging through her vast stock of knitting needles and patterns. Later, my Danish sister-in-law taught me how to knit socks, which in turn led on to knitting gloves and mittens and hats in the round. As my love and interest for knitting grew, along with my love and interes for the French language, I was then able to knit beside my Swiss grandma and I not only began to talk her native tongue, but learned to knit the continental way like she did.

Sadly my Swiss grandma is no longer with us and the other knitters in my family are far away across the other side of the Channel. But having such a deep family connection to the craft has always made it very special for me, a way to bond with these women.

Whenever I take out my five needles and cast on in the round, I feel I am somehow connected to these women by invisible threads of love, but also thrift and quiet craftsmanship. My beloved Grandma may have passed away, but she passed down to me not only her double pointed needles and darning mushroom, but also a wealth of precious family knowledge, of which I am now one of the guardians.

Perhaps one day when I am old and grey, one of my descendants will marvel with wide-eyed wonder when I tell them how I used to darn holes or unravel and re-knit socks that had grown to small like my own grandmothers did.  Or perhaps they will laugh at their excentric old grandma and wonder why she behaved like such an old woman whilst she was still young.