Passing it On

I have a very cool daughter.  She knows who she is and is full of justified confidence and beauty.  But she doesn't knit very much.  Somehow, I manage to love her anyway.

This Christmas, she went through a spurt of knitting enthusiasm when she was home over the festive period, but it waned, as it always tends to.

She had wanted to knit a cosy blanket.  She shares my loathing of ever being cold.  So, I took the five big squares she had knitted and stuffed into a basket alongside my stash - a mixture of acrylic, millspun and hanspun yarns in shades of turquoise and blues and greys - and added a new square of my own.  I bordered them each with one block of log cabin and then put it all together.

The seaming was a little hampered by our Westie deciding to sleep on the squares as I was sewing, but eventually, after much shoogling and persuading, that part was finished.

The mischief-maker in question - Deil, the Westie

One final block of log cabin around the very edge and it was done.  A collaborative project to keep her toes warm or sit across our knees while we watch RuPaul's Drag Race and drink chai together on the sofa.

So, I haven't passed the knitting and spinning bug onto my daughter.  She might take it up later, she might never lay hands on needles again.  It doesn't matter.  After all, non-knitters are people, too :o)

One thing I have found is that I'm passing my skills backwards instead of forwards - back to my mum instead of onward to my child.

My Mum was always a brilliant knitter, but has steadily gravitated towards simpler projects as she's gotten older.  But I've introduced her to knitting on circulars to take the strain from her arthritic wrists and she's mastered mitered squares for cosy blankets for her grandkids and great-grandkids.  She's even almost got the hang of applied i-cord.  She loves Elizabeth Zimmermann - the DVD's I loaned to her and the books that hold all the wonderful, timeless EZ patterns and she calls her 'that clever woman'.

So, it's not always about passing on our passions and fiber creativity onto the next generation; there are others who've come before who we can teach as we learn from their journey.  Teaching someone a new technique schools you as much as it does them.