Blog

Today I have a finished object to show you…

…but it doesn’t happen to be one of mine. It’s my grandmother’s.

I never met my paternal grandmother. She lived in another country, many thousands of miles away. She died when I was ten years old. A few years ago, I was looking for something entirely different in my dad’s closet and found this single, delicate, hand-knit bootie.

When I asked my dad about it, he said she knit a pair of booties for me when I was born. When I outgrew them (probably in a week or two–it’s teeny-tiny!), he put them away in a drawer and had forgotten all about them until that moment. In the 25-plus years that intervened, one went missing.

When I picked up knitting needles eight years ago, my dad didn’t mention that his mother had been a knitter. Like so many women of her era, she probably knit to keep the family in warm clothes and accessories. He likely wouldn’t have marked her handcrafting as anything odd or different (unlike today, when people gape at me when I knit in public and will often interrupt me to ask incredulously, “Are you knitting?” I’m always tempted to say something snarky like, “No, I’m swimming laps, actually”).

Dad said I could keep this little bootie, and I’m glad. Maybe I had nothing else in common with my grandmother–but at least we both understood the language of knitting and the feel of yarn sliding through our fingers. Maybe she enjoyed making delicate pieces on tiny needles–or maybe she cursed the whole way through the project and longed for a good worsted wool, like I would have. Either way, it makes me feel closer to the grandmother I never knew.