Knit Together

A family shares a hobby in this engaging short 

- Glenda Young

I’VE never forgotten who taught me how to knit. As a child, my fingers were guided by my mother’s patient hands. She sat with me, encouraging me as the needles first clunked then slid against each other, while the thread of wool miraculously transformed into one row and then another.

“Knit from the front and purl from the back,” she told me.

And so I knitted and I purled, line after line, enjoying being lost in my task.

Mum would allow me to knit with some of her wool left spare after knitting a cardigan for Dad, a hat for my brother, or a jumper for me.

We’d tie the ends of each of the remnants together and I’d start knitting with yellow that striped into red, before turning to green or to orange. My favourite was orange, back then.

Casting on was the hard part, but Mum’s gentle words of encouragement showed me how to wind the yarn around the needle correctly.

And when she’d shown me how to do it once, twice, then three times, I took over from her, showing her that I could knit on my own.

“Like this, Mum?” I would say, lifting up my work to show the wool going around my finger to slip on to the needle, casting on.

She would look up from her own knitting – a red and white poncho with a hood for me, I remember – and she’d smile. “Yes, that’s it,” she would say. And we’d sit together on the sofa, with the television on, but neither of us would be watching. We’d be far too engrossed in our work.

Mum’s hands would move the wool and her needles with ease and with speed. Sometimes she didn’t even need to look at what she was doing; her hands worked their magic as she read instructions from her pattern.

Mum’s fingers worked swiftly, taking the yarn to create stitches that turned into rows that turned into patterns that ended up as sleeves, necklines or hoods.