Knitting, by Simplicity

I love to do all sorts of handiwork: embroidery, crochet, beading, sewing, but none of them turn my crank quite like knitting. I’ve done it for so long, I honestly can’t remember anymore who taught me how. My aunt and grandmother did their best to make sure I learned everything a young lady of my generation needed to know how to do, and good thing too, because my darling mother was clueless. She could sing, play piano, and was a whiz at Scrabble, but use a sewing machine or make a doily? Wasn’t happening. To her credit, she made sure I was supplied with materials and instruction books for all the needlecrafts from age four on, and that I learned from Grandma and Aunt what I could not learn on my own.

Knitting took a backseat to other pursuits for many years, and then someone named the Yarn Harlot came along and the rest is history. My passion for knitting quickly took on proportions heretofore unknown, even to me. Grandma’s specialty was baby sweaters, but with a trunk full of them still perfectly serviceable 50 years later, I took on hats, scarves, and the final frontier, socks. If I’m not wearing something I knitted, I’m carrying around something I’m working on, or both.

When my friend Bonnie came to me with a knitting related question the other day, I was only too happy to talk shop. Her sister is looking for a pattern for a wrap sweater, and I mentioned that I had two or three I could recommend. And she said, “Where do you get those from, like, Simplicity?” Dead silence. You could have knocked me over with a feather. And then seeing the look on my face, she hesitantly added, “You make those by laying out the tissue on the fabric and cutting them out, right?”

Mom, I’m sorry you never got to meet Bonnie. She can't sing, but she plays a mean game of scrabble.