MORE KNITTING

The finished mauve sweater described a few days ago. It’s hard to see in this picture the gorgeous silver buttons which I managed to find in my huge box of mostly utilitarian buttons. It took some sifting to find five exactly alike, but they were there. The sweater was intended originally for my Flagstaff daughter, but it’s actually too small. Shame on me for not knitting a swatch! The Rowan pattern called for Rowan Big Wool and size 19 needles. I’ve never even seen size 19 needles, and the woman at the yarn store where we bought the pattern and yarn for the original sweater said that size 13 needles were the way to go, and it all worked out beautifully. The yarn for this new sweater could be called Biggish Wool, I guess. It’s a soft, very soft, mohair, wool and acrylic blend…..2 stitches/1 inch with US 13 needles. Anyway, large turned out to be medium, so the sweater will go to my oldest niece, who will love it I think, and hope. It’s a funny thing about knitted gifts…the recipient either loves whatever it is and wears, or uses it constantly, or they would much rather have a gift certificate to The Gap. In which case, it often ends up in a thrift shop. I know this because last year I bought the most exquisite blue hand-knit sweater with the “knitted for you by____” sewn into it, at a local, pretty upscale thrift store for $15.00. Near my home in Cambridge is a wonderful Irish store which sells a lot of fabulous hand-knit stuff from Ireland as well as yarn from an Irish mill. My daughter and I always go there to buy yarn when she’s here on one of her fall trips from Arizona. I was wearing the blue sweater and the owner asked me if I had knitted it. I explained that I do knit, but that I had bought this one in a thrift shop for $15 bucks. The look on his face was priceless. “I could sell that for $350” he said…and this was last October when the Great Recession was at its gloomiest. I replied that I thought that maybe I was in the wrong profession and should knit things for a living. But when we figured out the cost of the yarn and the hours put into it, it comes out to about $4 an hour…definitely below the poverty line, and I make a lot more teaching voice.

Years ago, I went to the Orkney Isles to visit my friend, the composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, (name-dropping here)and while I was there, I bought a lovely sweater in one of the several stores which sell hand-knit stuff made by local people, women mostly. I had this idyllic vision of the long cold winters with women sitting beside the fire in one of the many charming cottages on the islands, happily knitting out the long cold days. The truth is a lot more prosaic. The days are long…it’s pretty far north, but not particularly cold by Boston standards. It’s very beautiful, but hard to reach, remote and rural, and I don’t think that life is easy. You’d have to knit a great number of sweaters to make a living, and I know what my shoulders and hands feel like when I overdo it. How, I wonder, does anyone make a living knitting?