New Year's knitting is a lot like life

Sweater knitting is the best. 

On New Year's Day I retrieved this project from the bottom of the knitting bag where it had resided for the last six months. I had plotted out the cables, the seed stitch panels, the dividing stitches in columns in an Excel spreadsheet, based on swatches of the pattern stitches I'd made weeks earlier. There was some, ahem, guesswork involved, maybe some rounding out of the math. I cast on the number of stitches I thought I needed for the back of the cardigan and knit a couple inches. But when I measured the width of the piece and multiplied times two, I discovered I was on my way to knitting a sweater that was six inches bigger than I wanted it to be. Too much cardigan. 

I looked at the spreadsheet, didn't see any obvious places where I could make the sweater smaller. I didn't know what to do. So the yarn, the needles, the swatches -- they all went to the bottom of the knitting bag and I finished out 2022 knitting hats and mittens and a lace scarf.

But it's a new year. And knitting problems are solvable problems. I took another look at the Blue Aran Cardigan spreadsheet on New Year's Day. I relented on the 36 stitches of honeycomb cable I was sure I needed in the center and cut it down to 24. I changed the panels along the side seams to a simpler version of moss stitch or seed stitch (or whatever, this is a flashpoint for arguments among knitters) and got rid of another 12 or 16 stitches. I recalculated the total number of stitches for the width of the back of the sweater, plotted the increases needed between the ribbing and the body of the sweater, cast on, knit a couple inches, discovered I'd made some math errors, ripped, cast on again, ripped and cast on AGAIN, and a week later I have completed about 14 of the 17 inches I need to reach the place where it's time to start the armhole shaping. Did some math last night to figure out exactly how that will happen and put that information in the spreadsheet as well, in clear typed sentences, not scrawled, abbreviated notes. 

It's all so satisfying. There's the actual piece of knitting (above), in a beautiful blue, squishy and firm. And then there's the spreadsheet, also a thing of beauty. When I looked up information about armhole shaping in a reference book from my shelf, I found two pieces of knitting graph paper folded together and containing notes from an earlier sweater. I think it was this one, made six years ago for my son Kurt. 

There is a detailed stitch chart in one corner of the first sheet and calculations scattered around the page, but there is no indication as to which of the many figures are the final, correct ones. I wrote down as much as I needed to while thinking out other things out in my head and one the needles. It was good enough. The sweater fit (well, the sleeves are too long). He liked it. But I can't recreate it or write a pattern from my notes for someone else to use., 

I've been knitting since I was eight years old and knit my first sweaters when I was in high school. One was an Aran Isle cabled sweater, the other a Norwegian-style ski sweater with a multi-colored yoke. They were oversized, which is to say, too big.  (I still have them. They fit better decades later, and it's not the sweaters whose size has changed.) I then knit a cardigan for my dad when I was in college, during the oil crisis of the 1970s when everyone was turning thermostats down. It was warm, praised for its cables and my talent at completing it -- but enormous. 

I've knit many sweaters in the years since, most of which have fit their recipients appropriately. Most have been knit from published patterns, with some adjustments so that they fit. This requires math — and I like math. Often it requires turning back, ripping and restarting a project, which can happen only after you recognize that it's headed in a bad way. Hoping against hope that it will turn out okay anyway, or that you can shrink it or stretch it after it's done is not a successful strategy. It's not a strategy at all. 

I belong to a couple of knitting groups on Facebook where knitters from around the world show what they're working on and offer advice and information to one another. Different kinds of people post in different ways in this sort of social media. Some are encouragers: "beautiful," "lovely work," "you're so talented." Others jump in and respond helpfully to questions. There are disagreements. It's hard to tell people who have always done things one way that in some circumstances another way might be more appropriate. (See: slipped edge stitches, English vs. continental knitting, blocking superwash, blocking at all, etc.)

My personal pet peeve is the commenters who say that in 20 or 30 or 60 years of knitting, they've never worked a gauge swatch. 

(Gauge swatch: a sample of what you're about to knit in the yarn you're about to use on the size needles that you think will be appropriate. At least four inches square. Used to determine how many stitches you're getting per inch, which should match what's specified in the published pattern, because if it doesn't whatever you making is going to come out a different size.)

A knitter might have to knit several gauge swatches on different size needles to get the right number of stitches per inch. Or one might use the information gained in a gauge swatch to adapt a pattern, using math, to get the size garment desired. Neglect to swatch and you might get lucky. Or maybe you don't care about the finished size, which is okay for a blanket or even a child's sweater, since kids grow, but not okay for the hat that droops over the wearer's eyes or the pullover you're making from expensive yarn for your sister-in-law. 

The case against swatching is that sometimes you want to just be knitting. You want to pick up the yarn and the needles and go! Why not start the project and see progress immediately! 

But doing things well requires planning, critical thinking, repentance, turning back and starting anew. I did that with my blue sweater yarn, after a six-month period of aging, and it makes me happy right now to look at the work on my needles. 

I do a lot of moralizing when I think about knitting, especially sweater knitting. Sometimes I feel compelled to reply to those never-swatchers on Facebook, though often I'll delete the comment before actually posting it. I doubt I'd change their minds. Sometimes I want to point out that continuing to knit a project that is not going well is a waste of time. The two or three (or five or six) hours it would take to rip and restart are nothing compared to the hours of work that will be wasted when the finished project is too big, too small, too long, or just ugly. 

This is the moment for the "knitting -- it's a lot like life" statement. Plan carefully, think about what you're doing as you do it, don't be afraid to admit you're wrong, take appropriate steps to fix what you've messed up. My life does not hold up to the same level of scrutiny as my knitting. 

But hey, I seem to be on my way to a blue cardigan that will fit and keep me warm in the winter for the next 20 years. Which is not nothing. 

Happy New Year. 

Time

Standing, Emma, Dora, Hattie, Lydia, Amanda; kneeling, Clara, Esther.

 

Time like an ever-rolling stream 

soon bears us all away.

We fly forgotten as a dream

dies at the opening day. 

--- stanza from "Our God, Our Help in Ages Past"

Forgotten, like a dream? Not exactly. My ancestors are currently all over my dining room. Photos, postcards, recital programs, newspaper clippings, letters -- half a dozen boxes of these came down from the attic earlier this week to be shared with my sisters and cousins at a day-after-Christmas brunch. My paternal grandmother, Esther Sieving Gotsch, in her later years, as her independence faded, saw to it that a lot of this stuff landed at my parents' house. When my mother moved out of this house in 2002, 18 years after my dad's death, it ended up in my attic because a) I'm a saver and b) I'm the one in the family whose house has an attic.

Her son, my dad, was no mean saver himself. He kept copies of every recital he ever played -- and not just one or two. After the post-performance congratulatory conversations and the standing around and talking with old friends (I'm thinking of you, today, Len Berghaus), he'd grab a handful of leftover programs and drop them in his briefcase before leaving church. Though not very tall, he had hands and fingers that could comfortably stretch from the root of a chord to the tenth above (that's ten white keys on the keyboard). A handful of programs was 25 or 30 copies. When my sisters and I emptied the rickety wooden file cabinet on the front porch of my parents' home where they were kept, we winnowed the number down to two or three copies of each program. And yes, they're in a box in my attic.

The boxes from my grandmother contain lots of old photos. Grandma Gotsch wrote names on the backs of some of them -- enough of them to be a guide to the unlabeled pictures. One photo album contains little notes on blue paper in my handwriting. I must have looked through the album with Grandma or her sister Clara before they died. If I have any memory of this, it is the vaguest of memories, recovered only because of those bits of blue paper.

Esther was the youngest of five sisters. It is not easy to tell them apart when they are clustered around their mother in tiny, hundred-year-old snapshots. It's even harder to know who is who when you have just one or two seated blurrily together on a bluff at Starved Rock or Devil's Lake, and the face you're not sure about may not even belong not to a Sieving sister. It may be one of those names you heard talked about at Christmas dinners --Donnenfeldts, Molzahns -- when the meal was over and you wanted your freedom. 

My grandmother and her sisters were the second family of Pastor Herman Sieving, who married my great-grandmother, Hattie Träbing, a few years after his first wife died. She was 24; he was 43. They moved from Ottawa, Illinois, from the church where he had confirmed her, to York Center (now Lombard) where he became pastor at Trinity Lutheran Church at the corner of Roosevelt and Meyers Road. Herman Sieving died of a heart attack on a Sunday afternoon in 1901, found dead in the orchard by the congregation's treasurer, coming to bring him his paycheck. My grandmother was two years old, her oldest sister, Dora, just 14. Hattie was 39, with hard years ahead of her.

Hattie and Herman Sieving outside the York Center parsonage

A year or two after her husband's death, Hattie moved her family from York Center to a small rented house near the railroad in Forest Park. She worked as a seamstress, as a teacher, I don't know what else. Her daughters worked as they became old enough, and in 1920, financially secure, they bought a house further south in Forest Park. In 1958, when I was 4, my parents bought the house next door. The great-aunts, Emma (my grand-mother's half-sister), Lydia and especially Clara, were a big part of my growing-up years. 

They were known as "the girls," these residents of the house at 612 Beloit. My grandmother was the only one who married and she lived with her husband less than a mile away in Oak Park, in a house that was eventually enlarged and shared with her daughter, her daughter's husband and their four children.

The stories that my generation knows of these women barely appear in their photos. Amanda died in February 1922, age 32, in a state mental institution. Fifty or sixty years later Clara told me how she had threatened her mother with a butcher knife and how the pastor came to the house and told her that her daughter had to be institutionalized. Men of the congregation took Amanda to the hospital in Joliet. Dora died in November 1925, age 38, of TB, I believe. My father told me once that Dora's illness, which must have begun years earlier, was the reason his mother did not go teachers' college like her next older sister. The family needed her to go to work right after she left high school, because Dora was sick. Grandma's high school yearbook, the commencement program, a formal high school graduation portrait -- we have these things yet. Esther's disappointment -- there's no record of that, though Daddy attributed late-in-life quarrels between the sisters to Grandma's resentment of Clara receiving educational opportunities denied to her. 

I look at all these photos and imagine other stories, just from the photos' existence, from someone's decision to dress up the subjects and get their photos taken. There are baby portraits of each daughter at about four months of age, plump, well-fed infants dressed in fussy late-19th century dresses. There's more than one copy of each of these portraits; in the 1880s and 90s it seems that parents, just like today, ended up with more copies of a photo than could be given away, more than could be put in the garbage. Names are penciled on the back of at least one copy of each photo by someone who knew who was who, probably my grandmother, who in her old age, worried about who would hang onto all this family lore. Maybe she learned about each picture from her own mother, who packed them up and kept them as she moved first from the York Center parsonage to a house that someone in the congregation allowed them to live in and then to the house in Forest Park. There are confirmation portraits of each girl as well, in white dresses with corsages pinned on their shoulders. Esther has long hair coiling down over her other shoulder to her waist. 

There's another rather romantic portrait of Esther, sitting at a piano, turning to face the camera. There's the same coil of long hair. You also see a love of music, immersion in music, and aspiration, borne out a generation later in my dad's high school piano recitals and his career as an organist.

The attic boxes also hold thick photo albums with snapshots from travels, for example, a trip down the Mississippi for Mother and the girls, with stops in St. Louis and at the Shiloh battlefield. One page holds three photos labeled "roustabouts playing craps" and opposite it, photos of black dock workers unloading a boat. Curious. It was 1920 -- a time closer to the Civil War than we are today to World War II. 

There are photos from my grandmother's wedding, multiple copies in cardboard folders suitable for display.  Esther wears a beautiful tea-length dress with a floor-length train and elaborate veiling gathered around her face and pooled at her feet. One feels the full gathered female culture of mother and sisters in these these elegant photos. Meanwhile, Grandpa Gotsch looks great in a tux. He stands very straight and and the trousers break at just the right point over his shoes.

I could go on and on, and perhaps I should. Perhaps my own descendants will be interested and will read my blog someday.

Anyway -- all this stuff is all over my dining room. We unpacked boxes rather randomly on Monday; I'm trying to pack them back up in better order and add clues for the future. (My sister Linda used the zoom on her phone's camera to locate our dad in photos from his grade school, high school and college bands. She wrote notes on the back, like "Second row from left, between the tubas.") There are many random snapshots from the 1950s, when my generation was born. Many of these are from shared Christmas celebrations. As we kids looked at them together we remembered the patterns on the carpets, the special dolls, the hand-me-down dresses that appear from Christmas to Christmas on one girl after another -- clues to which year, which house, what our parents' lives were like. I should write our names on the backs before I put them back into their boxes. 

Time, you know, bears us all away.