knitting for love

For a long time I felt like the line from T.S Eliot:  "I have measured out my life in coffee spoons".  When I was a student and a young mother coffee played a big role in keeping me awake.  When I was working away from home my life seemed to be measured out in train journeys, whizzing away at the beginning of the week, whizzing  back at the end.  For the last three or four years the focus has been very much on elderly parents and for the last couple of years the measure has been weekly motorway journeys, six hundred mile round trips, the weeks chopped up into going to Devon, being in Devon, recovering from being in Devon and a squished up ordinary life.  I am still getting used to life without that tempo and without my father and mother, for somehow looking after my Dad seemed to obscure the fact that my mother had gone.  So the new shape of life is taking a while to settle itself around my shoulders.  But as I knitted and puzzled my way through a new baby surprise jacket last night I realised that there was a longer term mode of measurement which had been happening quietly while the big things in life, the deaths and the births, had exploded in the foreground.  This is the measure in garments knitted for the grandchildren, easy to forget as they grow and change before your eyes.  I was reminded of it yesterday when facetiming younger son and his family and seeing the baby smiling at me dressed in a stripy top I knitted for her sister.

I don't have photos of everything I have knitted (mistake!) but here we go.  This is the first ever version of the Baby Surprise Jacket pattern by Elizabeth Zimmermann that I knitted.  The surprise is that the pattern knits up into a rather wavy rectangle looking nothing like a garment of any kind and somehow at the end converts into a jacket.  This was knitted for grandchild number three, a little girl now two and a half.  I made it before she was born.  Her parents didn't want to know beforehand whether they would have a boy or a girl so this was my attempt at something reasonably unisex.  I loved doing this pattern.  It was complicated enough to need real attention and unusual enough to keep me guessing without needing the total focus of the fairisle gloves which I have recently got stuck on.

 This little jacket was knitted for number four grandchild, a little boy now nineteen months old.  He wore it a lot and always looked delightful in it.  This is a Debbie Bliss pattern from one of her baby knit books.   I have made a number of them and they always work really well.  I love the ones with a slightly retro feel to them.  It might be time to find another pattern for him!

 

Here he is demonstrating how long the jacket fitted and how good it was as swing wear.

 Not everyone gets clothes.  Grandchild number two, a boy now six, can't wear wool and is not a boy for jumpers.  He however made a special request for a flying pig.  Naturally as he lives in Wales it was necessary for the wings to be dragon's wings.  Oldest grandson doesn't tend to wear knitted things either as they rarely feature in the sportswear which he favours.  He is ten now and perhaps a bit old for knitted pigs!  I must ask him.

 

And I must admit that knitting for babies is particularly pleasurable.  It grows so quickly for one thing.  This pattern is called Gidday Baby and has become one of my staples for small babies.  It is knitted on circular needles and changes quite dramatically depending on what you do with colours and striping, or not.  Below it is modelled angelically and sleepily by grandchild number five, now six months old but about three weeks old here.

 Here is the same pattern in a slightly larger size for grandchild number six, another little girl.

  I think I might have just missed getting any photos of her wearing it.  Here she is at about three weeks old, pensive on Ian's knee.

And of course sometimes you just get carried away and find yourself making slippers.  These were for the granddaughter whose jacket started the blog, now a lively and delightful two and a half year old.  Here she is last year at not quite two.

They are a funny way of marking time, these projects.  Some of them, like the slippers, take only a few days from thinking to finishing.  Some take several weeks.  But they show in a very tangible and practical way how life goes on.  I am glad I returned to knitting after years away from it when it was just too slow and I had no domestic energy to spare.  It is nice to have something emerge from  under your fingers and when you make these things and give them away they take your love with them.