All in the family
One of the fun things all last month in Pune was being part of a knitting circle - entirely of family members. Not all of them beaming aunts with their fingers flying and tongues wagging either. Here’s my mum with my niece Gargi, a very poised, ladylike and adorable eleven-year-old. The little sofa by the window was their regular afternoon knitting corner:
All the women of my mother’s generation, and indeed, any knitters that I know in India, have never followed patterns. There are set weights of wool, set needles that go with them, there are kids’, adults’ and babies’ sizes and you either eyeball it by looking at the person’s torso, or go with a generic. There are of course horror stories of how the sweater fit the younger nephew instead, but none more dramatic than the gauge disasters we read of on blogs. How many stitches to increase? Row gauge? What kind of decrease? Negative ease? She doesn’t know and doesn’t care. Over the years, she has regarded my reliance on specific instructions with the same bemusement that I have her hunting-knife-and-wit approach.
This time, though, my mother wanted me to teach her how to do socks on DPNs with specific instructions for sizes, etc. She had only ever made booties on straights for babies; nobody really makes handmade socks for adults here, I don’t think, and anyway, in the hot climate it’s neither cost-effective nor a necessity. But she was curious about it after seeing me catch the bug.
She made a pair of toe-up short-row socks (which I *forgot* to photograph), and the whole experience taught me a lot about knitting vocabulary and styles. Teaching someone to knit might be easy, but teaching advanced techniques is difficult! (History is a breeze by comparison.) That too, teaching someone in a language (Marathi) that I don’t normally use for knitting, and what’s more, someone who has never really "read" a pattern while knitting. The sock was nearly abandoned many times, but finally, I think, my mum got the hang of short-rows. Should I have picked an easier method? I figured this was simpler than heel-down. After several hilarious attempts to translate "wrap and turn, purl to one stitch before end, wrap and turn, knit to two stitches before end…" I made notes with the grand intention of maybe writing up some patterns in Marathi someday.
Gargi liked some Knitpicks elastic sock yarn I’d taken with me, and my mum started her on a garter stitch hairband. It’s amazing what variegation in colour can do to the boredom of garter stitch, especially when the shades are pink and the knitter is a tween. She switched to single rib at both ends to draw it in behind the ears, and was most delighted when it was actually done.
The third knitter was my nephew Tushar, the son of another cousin, who excitedly learnt how to knit from my mum last summer, and ambitiously declared that he wanted to knit his own sweater. Alas, somewhere along the line he decided that knitting is for girls, and now wants nothing to do with it. I’m a cricketer, he told me firmly and solemnly. I had to struggle to get the blushing fellow to even pose for me with his creation!
Who knows, he might discover the joys of k2, p2 again later in life? Another cousin, Sudha, is also an avid knitter, but we hardly got any time together to chat and gossip this time, let alone knit. Next time!