Knitters and knitting

My mother, who died last year. was a prodigious knitter, in quantity, quality and velocity. We all benefited from her productivity usually in the form of pullovers (bear in mind there are ten of us). My mother then moved on to knitting countless baby cardigans as well as baptisimal shawls for the grandchildren and great grand children that inevitably followed. She seemed to barely have to look at what she was doing as her needles clicked away and the yarn ball shrank. 

I don't remember a time when she did not have a knitting project underway. A particularly poignant moment when helping my sisters clear her flat after she died was finding a half-finished baby cardigan in her knitting bag next to the armchair she sat in. One of my sisters said she would finish it off.

It is perhaps to be expected, therefore, that I have some admiration for knitters. In many ways it is a craft that sits well with smallholding and self-sufficiency. I know some smallholders that keep sheep and clean, card and spin the wool sheared from their own sheep flock, and of course knit with it. Knitting from scratch. That particularly impresses me.

We recently went to a birthday celebration for a smallholder friend in a village hall. We only knew one other person there. After the remains of the food (all home cooked of course) was cleared, the tables were set up and about a dozen or so, mainly but not exclusively women, got out their wool and fabric projects and spent the rest of the afternoon working on them: spinning, knitting, tapestry, weaving and lace-making. It was enjoyable looking on and chatting with them, as well as admiring their skill.

What this is all leading up to is that I have recently ventured into the mysteries of knitting myself. I knitted quite a few practice squares first and, when I eventually worked out why I was always ending up with more stitches on the needle than I started with, it was time for my first project. Inevitably a scarf - an uncomplicated rectangle. With great powers of concentration, a protracted delay when a few rows in succession produced too many mistakes to hide or ignore, and help from an experienced knitter to sort that bit out (thank you Anne), I completed the item. The wool (sorry, yarn) was more or less randomly selected but I will put more thought into the next piece of work. The only problem is the next step up from a scarf seems to me quite a big step so I've yet to decide what this might be.