The Heathen Housewife

Okay, so maybe yes, I just finished showing off my newly crocheted pop-top bags. Ahem. But really. I’m not a crocheter. No, really! I’m a *Knitter*. With a capital K. Yeah, because the last time I tried to explain the difference between people who occasionally dabble in knitting and capital-K Knitters, I managed to piss a bunch of people off. And the difference (in my mind at least) is the capital-K Knitters do it a heck of a lot more, and they think about what they are doing and want to continually do it better.

But back to not crocheting. I’ll admit, I knew how to crochet before I knew how to knit. Long, long before I knew how to knit. I took a little after-school class when I was about 8 and learned how to crochet from a teacher. My crochet career consisted of one hot-pink tote bag, then later – in my 20s – an ugly red scarf, and then a halfway decent afghan for my then-future in-laws right before I learned to knit. Whew!

But I’m a Knitter. Not a crocheter. suuuure. Except. I work with this really cool, smart, super-productive lady named Teresa at the yarn shop, and I see her around, and she’s pretty quiet in my limited experience but really nice, and knows a LOT. She not only knits, but also weaves and crochets. And she teaches and writes patterns for all these things. We’ve briefly chatted about knit versus crochet now and again over the years, and a while back I dragged in my pop-top tote bag and showed it to her, all proud of myself for implementing a crochet hook in another pursuit besides corralling runaway (knit) stitches. Yay, me!

And I mentioned that I thought granny squares were kinda cool, but had never tried one. So Teresa pointed out the lovely sample blanket hanging up on the wall, a giant granny square for which she’d written a pattern. It was cool looking, and she said it was easy. And then she did this awesome thing where she pulled out a copy of the pattern and GAVE it to me. She sent me off in the world with my very own copy. That was a pretty cool thing, and she acted like it was no big deal.

Well, I happened to have a pregnant friend (she’s not pregnant any more – this happened a while back, and now I have a new-mom friend with a super-cute new daughter). This friend is a long-time participant in a casual group of friends who get together for what we like to call Knitting Night, but is really just a chance for us to sit around gossiping, eating, and catching up, with the occasional knitting content. Most of the knitters in the group knit only when knitting night comes around every couple months. They are most definitely not capital-K knitters, and none of us has a problem with that.

Anyway, this particular friend needed a blanket for her new baby. Or, at least I assumed she would. I dug around in my stash, found some baby-colored merino I’d spun up, and sat down with Teresa’s pattern. Not very long later, this is what I produced…

Pretty cute, if I do say so myself! Except, I didn’t actually make the books. I just bought those to go with the present, because every new baby should have some board books around for when they are ready (and they are usually ready before you know it). I chose some of my favorites from the early days with Julie, and then Sophie – Good Dog Carl, The Snowy Day, Time for Bed, and Big Red Barn. I’ve always been picky about what I’ll read to my kids. There are so many good books available out there, but there are a lot of really crappy ones, too. These four are all a joy to read, even when you’re reading them for the hundredth time. Good Dog Carl doesn’t have many words – it’s mostly pictures, and you have to make up the words yourself (and it’s kind of creepy, too, but kids love it because the dog and the baby are getting away with a LOT and having fun), but the other three all have that wonderful rhythm and flow that only really good children’s books bring. And the pictures are nice, too.

So anyway, the blanket was finished in the blink of an eye between iterations of the spiral sweaters. One nice thing about a giant granny square is that you can just keep going until you run out of yarn, and that’s what I did. Somehow, I don’t think I’ve quite got granny squares out of my system.

I pulled out my stash of wool/cotton/nylon blend sock yarn and started making a pile of smaller squares. They are so easy to pick up and work on here and there – mostly when I’m finished eating my dinner and the girls are still picking and theirs. I have no plan with these, really. I am just picking up whatever ball strikes my fancy, and sometimes mixing in several yarns, sometimes sticking with just the one I started with. I don’t know how big this thing will be, and I’m trying very hard not to think about the issue of some day joining them all together (yikes!).

Much of the yarn in that little bin is left from the inundation from generous knitters everywhere at the beginning of the mitered square blankie project. I promised a good home to all that yarn, and that it would be put to use by someone. I’ve felt only a tiny bit guilty about holding on to this little stash of oddballs, because I’ve had more requests than I can count from other blankie knitters for bits and pieces. But this stuff has a different texture than the wool/nylon blends, and I knew that I would get around to using it.

Joe mentioned a while ago that he doesn’t like the throw blanket we have in the living room – it’s one that my maternal grandmother crocheted for me when I was a teenager, and it is made of cheap acrylic, so it’s got that squeaky plastic feeling to it. I keep it because of the sentimental value, of course. I know, you’re thinking “where’s THE Blankie then?” Well, it’s still on its world tour display at the yarn shop. It gets a lot of attention there, and is probably safer than it would be on the back of my couch. It will come home eventually. Who knows whether I’ll finish the crochet thingie before that happens, or whether Joe will be satisfied with either of them when they finally land on the back of the couch.

I guess maybe I do crochet, a little bit. Now and then…but I’m really a Knitter.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 4:54 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.