A pleasant Saturday afternoon
Sometime this past summer, a friend of mine emailed me to say that a picture of my Rangoli hat had seized her with the desire to knit one for herself, and asked me how difficult I thought this was. Said friend is, in a word, intrepid - she regularly reports on seventeen-mile hikes as if these were like a walk to the nearby grocery, and her attitude is generally to beam at any challenge in welcome. So I didn’t even bring up the “don’t you want to start with a garter stitch scarf?” line. Garter stitch scarves, I am convinced, are a horrid way to introduce most people to the craft - yes, the stitches are simple, but boy is the boredom of it off-putting! This wretched fabric is what I’m poking every stitch in the ass with this needle for? you say.
Yet, my own mind boggled at the prospect of teaching someone to knit cables on their first try (well, second - her first was an unhappy childhood encounter with booties and a bad teacher that ended after a mere six rows of stockinette). So we settled on a stockinette watch cap from one of my favourite books, Hats On! by Charlene Schurch. Today we went to Stash, and bought her a lovely Araucania Naturespun skein in shades of crimson.
Apart from Schurch’s book, we were fortified by some chai and Zimmermann’s Bible for moral courage. Not that she needed any. Before I knew it, she was off, knitting, purling, casting on and ribbing. First a small swatch, then 120 stitches cast on, and wheeeeeeee. It was great fun to actually see her figuring it out and answering her questions - so, what happens to the tail? How do I know this is a knit stitch? What do you mean, ‘knit them as they appear?’ Gauge?? Do I really need a marker? Aaah, so you can tell when you’re coming up to a decrease? And so on. I swear, I could actually tell when her hands relaxed on the needles, and the stitches began to get loose - very very quickly for someone who swore she was going to be a disaster at this. It was a delightful Saturday afternoon. Made me wish I could remember when I learnt the actual process. All I can still recall is clutching the red and white acrylic in one hand and my mother’s hand with the other, climbing the stairs to Sushila teacher’s house to learn how to crochet, as a seven year old.
I also started playing around with something else, hoping to make it into another Rangoli pattern, this time with colourwork. Just a peek, since I’m not yet sure what (if at all) it will morph into.
Watch this space!