Day off knitting
..also a chance to wish good luck to brilliant techie Tom L en route to seek fame and fortune in NYC ... hi to Annelise too! But I hope you also take note how well galvanised he is against the elements in his space invader hat knit by me in 4 ply from a pattern by Vinny on ravelry
I got back into knitting again a few years ago - a lot in 4 ply actually....for babies. Friends I held in very high esteem were due the baby they'd waited a very long time for, and to say joy abounded is understatement because they're really good people. So I wanted to give them something unique and every bit as good as I'd give my own, and I had knit for my own, but somewhere along the line had stopped.
The baby arrived with some health problems but things seemed to improve, and once that seemed assured, I set to work rustily, but quickly recalling how much I'd especially adored knitting baby clothes. When I was done, I dropped in to the baby's aunt - a neighbour - gift in hand, and received the news that things had taken a sudden bad turn, and really there are no more words to be said.
Later it struck me that every day healthy babies are born into problematic circumstances where it's possible to help, and perhaps the arrival of a no-strings-attached something someone-had-taken-the-trouble-to-hand-knit could be a morale boost for a beleaguered mother.... and even if it wasn't, what harm to have an extra layer in the drawer? I'd done time in prenatal myself years ago, and a feature then was an overbearing bossy lady pushing a trolley of glinting yarn that made your skin crackle with static as she hopefully pushed on past your bed and left you alone. She would deliver Instruction on Home Skills in such a highhanded tone that she only ever inspired fantasies of pushing over her trolley in me at any rate. But she was also the organiser of exactly the type of back-up system I had in mind, so I bought a Debbie Bliss baby book, drove consistent knitting friend, Karen, half mad with refresher questions, and began knitting baby things and didn't stop for several months - here's a picture of some…I think the sweater pattern was Sublime actually, but the rest are Debbie Bliss
... but when I tried to hand it all over to the hospital, it wasn't as easy as I'd thought. The trolley lady was long dead and I found that nobody had taken her place... not just that: nobody even seemed to begin to grasp what I was doing. Volunteer fundraisers were too glizty and didn't have the remotest interest in distributing bags of knitting; and social workers were hard to speak directly to, and when you did, suspicious that you were trying to offload some junk you didn't want. And that's the point where I began to appreciate that I'd probably been a bit hard on the bossy trolley lady, and presuming she or her ilk would go on forever was foolish...
In the end the clothes were accepted, but only after a intercession by a middle-person. And once they were received, the hospital was very appreciative -but I wasn't ever looking for that. The part that really worked out from where I'm clacking away here is that perhaps it succeeded in replanting a seed. That would be a gratifying result from a bag of knitting!