Knitting and Crochet Blog Week 2011: Better Off Not Knowing

All this week my postings are a part of the 2nd Annual Knitting & Crochet Blog Week. To learn more about it, just click here.



Strolling through my local thrift store the other day, I came upon a hand knitted hat hanging on a hook. I pull it down to examine it closer. It was small, pale blue and  knitted in simple stockinette. It was made for an infant. I wondered about the story and life behind this little hat. Maybe a grandmother had knitted it for their new grandson. Now that grandson is all grown up and headed off to college. Or maybe, like myself, some kind stranger knitted it for charity, hoping it would warm the head of a poor unfortunate child in need. Hopefully that child has grown up to become someone willing to help others the way someone had helped them.

Then a thought struck me hard in my heart. What if this hat was never used? What if the intended recipient never got a chance to wear it? At home at the very bottom of my stash box I have a small dark grey sweater and a half-finished white baby blanket. Both items were meant for my son. Neither item had the chance to be used.

I had a lot of grand knitting  and crochet plans while I was pregnant, but those plans were brutally interrupted with my acute liver failure and the untimely birth of my son at only 26 weeks while I was in a coma. Instead of showing off  my bundle of joy wrapped in some fancy crochet blanket, we both laid in the hospital fighting for our lives.

His christening gown would never be finished. Instead, he was baptised while covered in tubes and wires a day before his death at the age of only six month.

There would be no fast clicking of needles or the magic of my hook making cloth out of thin air. It would take me a month to learn how to feed myself and another three months to learn how to walk without assistance. My son would spend the first three of his only six months of life in a hospital, never to fully recover from his early birth under such extreme conditions.

My son and I would become known for being the hospital's  first successful rare back to back liver transplant and child birth at 26 weeks. I would have rather been known as the mother who knits her son way too many socks.

I look back down at the hat in my hand. Maybe I'm better off not knowing the story behind this little hat. Besides, I carry far too many unfinished stories of my own.

Why Do We Knit?

So why do we do it? That’s the question most knitters hear more often then any others. “Why do you knit?”

The feminist tell us, we have the freedom to do what we want, so why continue doing something that was an obvious sign of oppression for our mothers and grandmothers?

We hear the frugal young mothers say, why on earth would you knit something that you can buy for just a few bucks at Wal-Mart?

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The business woman reminds us that with our education, why would we stoop so low as to pursue a craft that’s the work of women in third-world countries that don’t have our opportunities?

Then there are men who hint to us that only spinsters and women of leisure have the time to entertain such a thing as knitting.

Finally, there is that voice that creeps in the back of our own minds that question why we would spend such time and energy on a child-like activity of playing with sticks and string.

Then, with the start of a cast on, the turning of a heel, the finishing of a sleeve or even the bind off of a scarf, we remember. We remember the men and women that knitted because they had to. The children and spouses that were clothed because we loved to. The soldiers that were grateful because we knew how to. The art that is expressed through the different stitches and techniques because we learned to. And the next generation that will carry on the tradition because we pass on to. So why do we knit? Personally, because we want to. But as a universal craft that crosses all boundaries of color, race, sex, religion, sexual orientation and social status- as a human race we realize the reason why we knit is because we need to.