Knitting Diary

In an attempt to do some low stakes but regular writing, and in hopes of doing a better job of chronicling the knitting I’m doing (better than last year’s abandoned Excel sheet anyway), I am going to keep a blog of my major knitting projects.

Knitting is both a lightweight and heavyweight activity for me. On the one hand, it makes an hour or two spent watching television feel somewhat laudable if I also managed to throw a few more rows onto a cardigan for someone’s baby or a hat for my own cold head. In this capitalist hellscape, where productivity is one available system of self-censoring morality, I feel productive. I was not *merely watching telly*. In a deeper sense, knitting connects my activity back to kinds of expertise and artistry that weren’t always properly appreciated as such in our history. Especially in Ireland, where the families of fishermen made them invaluable armour against harsh conditions, and also where we locked up poor women and forced them to make beautiful, dainty lace for wealthy visitors, there is complexity here. There is depth.

In addition to its depth, there is knitting’s remarkable inefficiency. Making one adult sized jumper of sufficient complexity can take months. It is, arguably, a bad use of one’s time (this is why knitters are often slightly upset when someone says “you could sell these”, even when people say it with the best of intentions). The inefficiency enhances the extent to which it is an act of love. I could just buy you something, and with the wool money alone, something nice could almost always be procured. Instead, I will give you hours and hours of my time. I will pull my project of care around the world with me for a few days or a few months. I will steal the rare opportunity of a seat on the Luas to knit a few rows, I will eat my lunch extra quickly and tell my economist colleagues what I’m working on for the remainder of my breaktime, I will (occasionally) knit beyond the comfort of the bones in my hands. This little hat, or this jaunty scarf, is a slow, imperfectly-formed benediction unto the people of my world.

January 2025

My first project (now my third project) is interrupted when, for the first time in a while, my 4-year-old daughter–who no longer wears anything I have knit for her–asks me to make a scarf in the style of one worn by her beloved creche teacher, Sergio. She’s explaining the shape (it’s a snood) using wild gestures and some passion, and, though I have warned myself constantly against the heartbreak of knitting for her only to have her refuse to even try it on at the end (“maybe tomorrow?”), I cannot help myself. [I am very grateful for her giant baby brother, who, fits almost anything made for her, so has for the most part become a good receptacle for my disappointed daughter-bound projects]. One such tragedy involved her accompanying me to the wool shop, begging me to buy this multi-coloured, nepped wool. I opted for a short sleeved version of Tin Can Knits Flax jumper pattern, and growing increasingly anxious as the garment materialised, she refused to try it on at the end.

So, I have a good stash of 4-ply DROPS Nord wool in loads of nice colours my mum got me for Christmas three years ago to make a blanket for my couch that I never got around to… I take my daughter in there and ask her to choose the colours she likes. She chooses a rainbow selection of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and navy, and I initially think that’s too many, but who cares, she’ll probably never even wear it.

I don’t have a pattern, but how hard can it be to make a nice stretchy cylinder. I cast on 120 stitches, wool held double, and I finish the red block that night, which is ten rows in 1×1 rib. I tell her in the morning “I did 1,200 stitches for you last night, look!” She seems excited. I try to send cautious thoughts to my heart, but I keep going and have the orange bit done by that evening, between my commute, lunch and dinner time. This burst of industry continues until all 6000 stitches are done, and I merely have to bind off and weave in the ends. She seems even more excited and when she’s going to bed, I tell her I’ll have it ready in the morning, and I do have it ready and SHE PUTS IT ON.

She loves it. She has worn it to school every day since, she keeps thanking me for it and telling me it’s beautiful. She says she wants me to make her a dinosaur jumper in the same wool, and despite the clear madness that would represent, I’m seriously considering it. It was honestly the best start to the year of knitting I could have imagined.

My second project is a kid’s hat for one of my daughter’s close pals from creche. We’d recently been to his parents’ wedding, at which we learned both families are very involved in Waterford hurling. I thought it would be fun to try and use those colours for the hat, so I went to the wool shop with my little reference picture. It’s a very specific, cool shade of blue, so I was quite limited in my choices (a mercy!). I found a really nice blue that I thought was pretty close (I think it’s #273 here), but the only white they had in the shop was much more a cream than a crisp white. Usually I would prefer this, but I felt I was definitely stretching the palette a bit. That said, I couldn’t find a better pairing and my 4yr old shopping assistant was beginning to make wilder and wilder demands of me, so the decision was made. The wool is unbelievably soft and squishy and it will be nice to make something from the remnants…

I used my old favourite pattern: the Ammil beanie. I believe I have made close to 40 of these hats. I am constantly stumbling upon pictures of versions I made in my phone that I don’t even remember making, much less know who owns them now. It’s a fantastic pattern. I like it because it’s fairly easy to knit (and knits up quickly) without being dull. I find patterns that use chunky wool can often look a little bit pillowy and clunky (not always unwelcome…), or like they lack intricacy, but this one is an exception to that rule. It has a large soft cable element and an interesting little flower stitch technique. I’m not really sure how to describe this kind of stitch, but it involves inserting a working needle into a stitch a few rows below you and looping working yarn around it, to create a kind of super long stretched stitch (it looks a little bit like a detached chain stitch in embroidery).