14 Valentines
Day 4: Reproductive Rights and Motherhood
Wiggum, an intarsia toddler sweater. Knit on comission for a friend of my mother, for her great-nephew's baby shower.
I rarely knit on comission; it's a discussion that my crafty friends and I talk about a lot. For most people, I think they don't knit on comission because you hardly ever get paid what the project is worth to the crafter. A good friend of mine says that when asked about knitting socks on comission, she quotes them around 600$ for a pair of socks. She charges what she would get paid at her job per hour, and applies that to how long it would take her to knit. She's highly trained for her career, and she's been knitting even longer so I see that as a pretty reasonable way to go about it. It also ensures that nobody actually takes her up on it, because once that happens it becomes work and an obligation instead of an indulgence.
My reasons for not knitting on comission usually has more to do with a lack of confidence, that doubt that even if the other person absolutely loves it, I'll feel guilty about it not being absolutely perfect. It could be the most amazingly beautiful object, and my eyes will stray to some uneven stitches, or wishing I'd been able to get my hands on another shade of blue, or just plain anxiety that the person will hate it and think less of me, because that's how my crazy rolls.
Now, if this project had come to me any other way, I probably would have turned it down. However, it came through my mom from one of her oldest friends at work. While they were at dinner, mom was telling her lady friends (okay, I'll admit it: she was bragging) about my knitting and about the sweaters I'd finished. Gerri asked her if I could knit something for her, and mom said she'd ask. When she came back to me, I kind of rolled my eyes a bit, since I didn't want to put mom in a position where she'd have to say no, but it sounded interesting enough: one of those old-school picture sweaters, for a baby. With a train on it. That sounded pretty cool, so I went in to work with mom to talk to Gerri about it. We talked, and I fell in love with wanting to knit this sweater.
So Gerri's father worked for CN Rail as an engineer, and so did her brother. When they were small her mother knit them sweaters: she had one with a ballerina, and he one with a train on it. She's always remembered these sweaters.
Over the past few years their parents have passed on, and Gerri found the patterns while going through her mother's things, and held on to them. They're in pretty good condition, and still have some of her handwritten notes on them.
And then suddenly, her brother died. It sounds like she was devastated and had (still is having) a hard time with it. I know that events that happen in the wake of something like this are always hard to describe as happy or fortuitous, but then it happened: after a while of trying, her nephew and his wife became pregnant. She was very excited to get to help take care of and spoil the kid, at the same time giving her nephew something that would be a link to his father- a replica of the sweater he'd had as a child.
Okay, so after hearing this, I couldn't not be a part of this.
She brought in the pattern and we made photocopies of the directions and charts. There was one corner of the chart missing, which corresponds to part of the smoke coming out of the train, but she said not to worry and I cold fudge it if I needed to. We went shopping for the yarn, and found a good yarn in Norway Baby Ull- a nice soft superwash wool in fingering weight.
Along with the story, my big incentive for doing this project was the chance to try a new technique: intarsia. I love fairisle knitting, and switching colours often but I'd never tried knitting this way. For those who don't know, intarsia is when you have blocks of colour, instead of lines of colour. Another way of thinking about it is like painting with yarn colour, putting it in a very specific spot, instead of having it appear in a regular pattern in a row (like a colour printer.)
The first attempt at it was okay, not great. I finished the back, and was not entirely satisfied- there were some gaps and holes in some places, it was tight and puckered in others. I ripped it back, watched more videos on youtube, and tried again.
And it worked. And I zipped through the back, the two fronts, and the sleeves. And then I put it away for a bit since that had been the only knitting I'd done for a few weeks. And then it sat some more. And a bit longer. Then I realized that the baby was coming and oh yeah, the sweater still needed to be blocked, pieced together and the neckband/buttonband put in place. Luckily I'm more confident with that, so that zipped by and I chose the buttons and then took it to work to steam it (the advantages of working at a used clothing store), wrapped it up nicely with some bobbins of extra yarn in case of oopsies, and then sent it off.
Honestly, I'm ridiculously pleased with how this turned out. My eye still catches the odd spot of the sweater that I wish I'd done better, but knowing how happy Gerri was with it, how much I learned in terms of technique, the chance to knit an older pattern (one of my secret joys in knitting), this sweater gets a huge pass and I'm tempted to fo it again for one of my nieces or nephews.