Of hand-knitted sweaters and heartwarming smiles
Besides knowing how to spin good bedtime yarns to send her kids to sound sleep, my mother had had an additional talent to doll them up by knitting yarns into fascinating fabrics, especially homemade sweaters. Wielding a pair of aluminium knitting needles, she would work them with utmost focus, investing a considerable amount of time and patience to knit sweaters of intricate designs made from multiple colours of yarn that lined our wardrobes as both casual and party wear.
The other day while leafing through an old album, my fingers suddenly stopped at a childhood picture of my favourite red sweater hand-knitted by mom with the word, Hello, embroidered in yellow on the front. The sight of the sweater overwhelmingly consumed me with nostalgia as it often caught the attention of passers-by driving them into greeting me with a cheery “Hello”. My mom’s expertise in producing wonderful sweaters besides gloves and monkey caps had its genesis in her childhood passion to learn knitting.
The scarcity of both money and fundamental resources couldn’t deter her from making mild and hesitant headways in the beginning. Necessity was the mother of invention for my mother too for she made use of a pair of broomsticks as cheap knitting needles, but their easily breakable feature required their immediate replacement with relatively sturdier bamboo sticks that she whittled to a taper at one end to achieve improved results. However, those bamboo sticks came with a problem as the stitches slipped off from their other open end, so she upgraded to a pair of discarded spokes of a bicycle’s tire, twisting their ends into curvy knobs.
Having purchased the yarns of various colour combinations, she would sit cross-legged to coil the whole length of the yarn across knee to knee in the numeric figure of a horizontal eight before rewinding it all around her palms to convert them into tight woollen balls to withstand stresses involved in the knitting.
The cutting movements of the pair of her knitting needles looked as if two swords were trying to cross each other. However, their complementary work in unison to form new stitches left us in awe. The tapered end of one needle would catch a loop of the working yarn to draw it through an unsecured stitch on the other needle to secure the initially active stitch, automatically forming a new unsecured one in its place.
As an honorary instructor, my mom taught many women in the neighbourhood, though, side-effects of her noble service would leave spectators in stitches when kids of all ages wearing sweaters of identical designs and sometimes even of the same colour huddled in the playground. At present, her Youtube learning has sharpened her knitting flair, imparting modernity and freshness to her pieces plus flooding her limited designs with unlimited combinations. She loses her cool when dad employs the long shaft of her needle to relieve his itching back, or when she faces obstruction to postpone her work to winter. In protest, she furiously strikes her needles into the woollen balls to wind up, only to resume the next day with the same warmth.
To garner priceless acknowledging smiles over monetary gains from people of all ages wearing her creation has been her sole motto. The best part is she still strongly stands by her resolution to continue uninterrupted with her dexterous manipulation of yarns by inter-looping and intermeshing them into hand-knitted fabrics too fine even worth causing a twinge of envy to automated knitting machines.
THE CUTTING MOVEMENTS OF THE PAIR OF HER KNITTING NEEDLES LOOKED AS IF TWO SWORDS WERE TRYING TO CROSS EACH OTHER