A Blanket Made of Stories

I'm knitting a blanket. Again. I don't mean that I'm knitting another blanket, but that I've gone back to working on a blanket that was put away for a few years. I'm going to talk about sports for a minute, but stick with me. It all comes together. 

I'm not a sports person. I've always been that one person in groups of family and friends that just doesn't care about any sport. I at least understand baseball. Okay, I understand the basics of it. I figure not caring about sports fits in with not caring about watching gamers streaming games, and being mostly immune to doomscrolling and Fear of Missing Out. I've got my own stuff to do, so I don't want to watch other people do stuff and can walk away from what everybody else is doing if it isn't my thing. With sports, I've never been able to understand team loyalty, or "we won". We? You weren't playing! The people on the team won!

That's been my whole life until this year. Now we found out I like hockey! And I decided it would be easier for me to learn about hockey if I focus on one team, so I chose the Seattle Kraken. First of all...Kraken! How was I going to pass that up?! Also, I spent a couple of weeks in Seattle visiting an aunt when I was a teenager and absolutely loved it there! After watching some videos and a few games, and reading more information about that game than I would have expected in just a week, I can tell you I'm most interested in goalies. So, I've got a sport and a team now! 

What does this have to do with knitting? I knit while I watch tv. I have a lace knitting project going on one pair of needles that I hope will be beautiful once it's finished and has been blocked. Mohair yarn, Old Shale stitch. Sometimes I stop between rows, spread it out, and just look at it for a minute.

The thing is, I have to keep count of my stitches. I can do that during regular shows. It's okay if I miss a phrase in something a character says, or if I don't see who got out of a car first. I won't miss enough to not understand what's happening. Hockey, though? That game moves fast! I need something to knit that my hands can pretty much do the job without my brain. I didn't want to start something new when I've already got something going and am also working on holiday gifts for people, so I pulled out the blanket I haven't worked on for a long time.

(Square blanket, about the size of a baby blanket, knitted in spirals of teal, blue, purple, and green yarns.)

That's a Ten Stitch Blanket. It's called that because a row is only ten stitches, and the blanket gets bigger because you're working in a spiral and connecting the current row to the edge of a previous row. Some people choose specific yarn for one. I decided mine would be what's called a stashbuster project. You use yarn you've already got in your stash, which is often leftovers from other projects. Too much yarn to just throw out, but who knows if you'll ever have a project that it's right for again?

I started that blanket when I was new to knitting. My stash of yarn had been built by decades of crocheting, but I had only been knitting for a year. All of my flat projects were garter stitch, and everything done in the round was stockinette. If you're familiar with knitting, you might recognize that means everything I was doing was only knit stitches. I was avoiding purling while still getting used to working with two needles instead on one hook. And this blanket is garter stitch (though I don't see any reason it couldn't be done in stockinette), so this would be easy and give me something other than washcloths, hats, and fingerless gloves to work on. I was running out of people to give hats and gloves to.

We lived on a farm at that time. I sat outside and knitted while talking to my goat as he grazed. I sat in the barn and knitted while telling one of the horses she could leave, but I wasn't going anywhere. (I was kind of scared of the horses and first, and she made a point of intimidating everyone she could.) I knitted while the dog who had taken on the role of my personal guardian slept next to me. I knitted during long conversations.

And then I started knitting other things. The blanket taught me how to work short rows, and how to wrap and turn, in order to make mitered square corners. It taught me how to pick up stitches along edges in order to connect pieces. There were so many other things I could knit now! Things that wouldn't be a blanket spread over me during the heat of the summer! I kept going back to the blanket, though.

Until I didn't for a stretch of years. Life changed, and some of those changes were painful. Dogs died. My goat died. When you're surrounded by a lot of animals of various ages, sometimes you go through a stretch of too many animals getting too old in the same year. There was leaving the farm and working on settling in a new place. Family members finishing school. Family members getting new jobs. When I wanted to get the blanket out, I just couldn't. It belonged in a place and time that I had been shut out of.

When I pulled it out last week, I had that feeling again at first. We had to say goodbye this year to the last two animals who had slept and played on the blanket when I worked on it before. How do I finish the blanket when everything it was part of is already finished? Something inside of me said that's part of why I should finish it. Because no, everything that was part of it is not gone. I'm still carrying those memories and weaving them into the yarn. 

And the yarn! The yarn has stories! That yarn moved across the country with me. Some of it was given to me when I didn't really have money for yarn by friends who needed to clean out their stashes. Some of it is in the granny square blanket I made as an experiment with putting together squares of different sizes, and which my spouse claimed as a blanket for naps. Some of it is in my first big knitting project, which was my Doctor Who scarf. One of the blue yarns was leftover from the hat I made for my dad shortly before he died. 

I hadn't worked on it for so long that I forgot how the rows are joined at first. There are two main ways of doing it, and I accidentally started doing it the other way from how I had done it before.

(A close up of a few green rows attached in a way that is obviously NOT how the rows before and after are attached.)

I could have pulled those few rows out and redone them, but I decided to let them become part of the stories. They don't stand out when looking at the whole blanket, but they will always make it easy for me to find the point where I started again after keeping it all packed away for so long.

There's a young cat who joined our family a few months ago. The first night she saw me working on the blanket, she sniffed around it in a way that she hasn't done with other things she's seen me work on. Being packed away all this time, I see how it could still have smells of the farm that a human can't smell, but a cat can. She walked around, sniffing cautiously and looking up at me like, "Where is this place? Who are these creatures? Why do I not know these smells?" Then she rubbed a whole side of her body along the pile of my work, laid down on it next to me, and purred. She didn't recognize the smells, but she knew this was home. 

The blanket isn't a wall shutting me out of the past. It's a gateway. A layer of knitted yarn that connects different places and times. We can all hold each other again. I'm crying as I write this. There are no adequate words for what it means to me. 

I remembered something last night. I said I started the blanket when I was new to knitting. That's true, but it wasn't the first time I had knitted. I had to learn again because I had forgotten everything from the first time. I had only done it for a couple of months, and it had been many years before. It was when I visited Seattle and my aunt showed me.