Feral Knitting

Many years ago when I was a much younger and less experienced knitter, I decided to make a fairisle sweater for my then 3 year old daughter.  In my youthful enthusiasm, it did not occur to me that the project might be beyond my abilities nor did I think to consult a more experienced knitter or even an instruction manual.  I picked up my needles and jumped in.  I enjoyed the experience - it's always fun to make children's clothes because they work up quickly - and my daughter seemed quite happy with the result.

When I proudly displayed the sweater to my mother in law, she promptly turned the sweater inside out and showed me all of the errors I'd made in carrying, or failing to carry, the yarn across the motifs.  "I didn't know that you knit" said I.  "I don't, but I know how not to knit" she replied.

Undeterred, I made plans to knit co-ordinating sweaters for the entire family to wear in our Christmas photo.  A two year stint in Miami derailed my knitting career for a bit - working with wool in the sub-tropics is of limited appeal - and by the time we returned to a cooler climate, our family had grown in number, in girth and in taste.  Knitting four largish sweaters and coaxing them onto the backs of unwilling models was beyond me.  I swore off knitting in two colors and embarked upon a, mercifully brief, affair with novelty yarns.

Until I spied a kit for a fairisle purse in my favorite cottage country yarn shop and my friend Jan presented it to me as an unbirthday gift.  I consulted my sister who provided me with directions for the two-handed fairisle technique, purchased the requisite bobbins and needles and installed the project in my knitting basket.

Where it sat for over a year.  It wasn't just the fairisle that intimidated me.  The base of the bag is knit in seed stitch - possibly the world's most boring stitch.  It also required I knit an i-cord which made me think of some painful gynecological procedure.  And I discovered an error in the pattern but lacked the confidence to make the obvious correction.  I felt quite paralyzed.

Periodically Jan would ask how the bag was coming along.  I admitted that I kept it confined to my knitting basket, at a safe distance from my armchair, from where I imagined I sometimes heard it snapping and snarling at me.  We took to referring to it as the "feral" bag.

Little by little, I moved the chair closer to the bag until one day, outfitted in suitable protective gear, I picked up the needles and set it free.  Apart from the i-cord, it was not nearly so ferocious as I'd thought.  (I have this to say about i-cord: it's silly.)  I quite enjoyed taking the project on outings; it impressed novice knitters ("that looks hard!") as though I had a tiger on a leash.  (They didn't realize I would return home to spend an hour or more undoing what I had knit in their company - keeping the feral beast in line required my undivided attention.)

Here is the finished project.  It's lined with a remnant of quilting fabric and I used webbing for the handles rather than i-cord.  A second bag is on the needles as I write.  And I'm considering the color options for our 2015 family Christmas photo...