A friend of mine recently finished knitting a gorgeous cape in purple, being her favorite color. It took her quite a while to do it because it involved a lot of knitting. So, I was just sitting here reminiscing (which I spelled without looking it up) about my knitting history. I don’t knit. But I did knit, long ago.

Let me get a sip of tea and a bite of chocolate chip cookie and I’ll relate some amusing, or maybe not so amusing, yarns, which are also tales or stories.

Being old enough during World War II to knit, I helped my mother make sweaters for soldiers. The government gave out yarn, in sick green/grey, to use in making the sweaters. Mom and I both worked on the same sweater each time. Mom used very tight stitches and mine were quite loose. These had to be the ugliest sweaters ever created, but the point was to keep our men warm.

Around this same time, I knit a scarf for my grandpa to give him at Christmas. This was the world’s longest scarf. It was a silvery grey. Nice. However, my dear Gramps had to wind that scarf around and around to keep from tripping on it.

During college, I knit my boyfriend (now my husband) argyle socks. Now, these are not easy to make, and I have no memory of how I did it. Anyway, he loved them. He still had them when we got married, so for our first Christmas, I used a pair as you would use a Santa stocking. I tucked a large orange into the toe. Now, if you have already read “Ticked Off And Tickled About It,” you know that my husband likes fashionable clothing. He does not like stretched socks. Well, a Santa stocking was not in our extremely limited budget. Our Christmas tree was just like Charlie Brown’s and our decorations were cut out of white paper by me.

My best memories about knitting were the many beautiful sweaters that my mother knit for me. The first year I was in college, she made me six sweaters and gave them to me for Christmas. Each one was in a different color.

One of the sweaters was a rusty orange and at the time I was a redhead. When I walked around the small campus, it was like a spotlight moving. One time, my boyfriend and I cut out of a meeting we were suppose to attend every week. The next day, the Dean of Women said to me, “If you are going to cut, don’t wear your orange sweater.”

So as for my knitting history, it would probably best be described as “pearl, one…nit wit, two.”

COMING UP: Step Right Up