   
First Sweaters and
Kindly Librarians
by Rita O'Connell
Doing substitute teaching this
winter at the school system I attended from kindergarten through high school has
triggered a lot of memories, including about knitting my first sweater.
When I needed to kill some time (oops, I mean spend some pleasurable time)
between two teaching assignments last week, I went into the school library. What
memories! It's a new space, but many of the books I took out during the '60s
are still there - I walked down the shelves looking for favorite authors &
titles (junior high is when I discovered and read all the science fiction I
could get my hands on: Asimov, Heinlein, Norton, etc.).
And I thought about the librarians, one of whom became my
most-conveniently-available early knitting mentor. Although I learned to knit
at 12 from a booklet my sister got for Christmas, I had few adults to ask, and I
never took out a single book about knitting then (I doubt there was one in that
library), so the librarian couldn't have known I was a knitter from the books I
borrowed. But somewhere along when I was 14 or 15, another knitter, perhaps the
neighbor, gave me a pattern for a sweater that was just the fad back then. I
remember it as being either a handwritten or perhaps mimeographed sheet of
directions. The sweater was a simple round-yoked, 3/4-length sleeved,
stockinette cardigan knitted of worsted weight on large needles (US size 10 or
larger, I think) in a back-and-forth fashion. It had ribbed bottom edgings, a
single-crochet edging around the neck and down the front edges, and yoke
decorations of rows of yarnover eyelets alternating with seed stitch. Any of
you remember that sweater style? Just the fashion in about 1964 in NE
Minnesota.
Well, I made a cream-colored version and was proudly wearing it, probably with a
wool plaid skirt, white peter-pan collared blouse, and cream knee-socks (we
called them half socks). I was in the library checking out a book and the
librarian complimented me on my sweater. I'm sure I was ecstatic in my beaming
response that I had made it myself!! She leaned forward over the checkout
counter and gently whispered, "Did you know that you twist your stitches?" I
looked down, both horrified/embarrassed and intrigued. I asked her what she
meant and she pulled one corner of the sweater up and showed me how the base of
each stitch was crossed. She asked me how I knitted and I didn't have any
projects with me so I said something about bringing some in the next day so I
could show her.
I remember riding the bus on the long ride home (about 45 minutes) that day,
continually pulling the corner of my sweater up to look at it - and thinking all
the while that I HAD been puzzled about why my knitting hadn't looked quite like
other commercially knitted items I had examined - all of those were socks and
sweaters of very fine yarn. I remembered how when I had pulled horizontally
(row-wise) on those items the stitches had seemed to stretch sideways evenly,
while mine seemed to stretch into horizontal lines interspersed with little
round knots. But I had no hand-knitted items to examine, so I figured that
perhaps hand-knitting just looked different from commercially knitted. Well,
now I knew that it was my hand knitting technique that was the problem.
So that night, after my minimal school homework, I sat down to thoroughly
analyze my knitting - after all, I wanted to know what I'd been doing wrong and
fix it. And I figured it out - I knitted some swatches and tried to make the
stitches untwisted. I soon discovered that I could fix the problem. I think I
found that I needed to do 2 things - change the direction I wrapped the knit
stitches AND change the direction I inserted the right needle into the stitch
for knit stitches. And it worked (I knit while holding the yarn in the left
hand and wrap my purl stitches the easy way - which I years later found out to
still be the atypical way). And then I proceeded to rip out that entire
cream-colored sweater (made of Red Heart wool yarn, by the way).
So I showed the librarian my correct swatch the next day and she told me it
looked right - but she didn't see me actually purl to tell me that I still
wrapped the purls the atypical way. So off I went, and I was pleased to knitted
a dark green sweater using the same pattern, with no twisted stitches. But I
never reknit that cream-colored one...
That librarian encouraged me a lot in my knitting all the rest of the way
through high school. I showed her my completed knitting (I never brought
in-progress projects to school) or asked her occasional questions - I knew that
I couldn't take her time away from her real job, but she was happy to consult
for a minute or 2 whenever I came in.
Good memories - both from thinking about first sweaters and about sitting in
that high school library.
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