Grandma's knitting

Sweaters from my childhood and my afghan

Knitting skills

My grandmother was a very stereotypical grandmother.  She knitted afghans, and sewed clothes, and baked cinnamon rolls.  My mother also sewed all of our clothes when we were kids too.  This was mostly out of necessity as 3 quickly growing little boys would probably have really stretched her budget.  It was a lot easier to have constantly adjusting hemlines in the homemade hand-me-downs.

 

Anyway, we were always fascinated by my grandmother’s knitting.  She could knit anything.  When I was about 6 or 7, I asked to learn how to knit.  She fashioned needles out of city chicken sticks for me.  City chicken was a Pennsylvania thing; veal and pork cubes sold with wooden skewers*.  My little hands learned to knit.  I made many white floss bandages that were donated to our church.

 

Nothing much really came of my ability to knit though.  Years later, I was in a college production of The Crucible.  The director wanted all of the women in the cast to have handcrafts.  Lo and behold I taught some of them how to knit just as I had been taught (we used real knitting needles though.)  I remembered the basic skills from 15 years earlier.

 

Again, nothing really came of the skill…until recently.

 

My grandmother is still alive but can no longer knit.  We had her 90^th Birthday celebration in 2004 and a large part of the weekend was a gallery of work she had done over the years.  We assembled needle work from friends and relatives that she had made.  Wedding quilts and afghans were hung around her church’s fellowship hall with tags describing their histories.  My own fisherman’s afghan with its intricate cabling and honeycomb patterns had its place next to baby sweaters and booties that my mother saved.

 

Something was missing.  My sister got married a week before the birthday celebration.  In this vast gallery of needlework her wedding afghan was not there.  Each of us (17 grandchildren) received an afghan as a wedding present or similar event.  My sister being the youngest granddaughter should have received one too.  Apparently, my grandmother started the piece but her concentration had diminished too much.  Stitches were missing as well as other mistakes.  I thought, “What a sad ending?”  I wished that my sister had the same opportunity that the rest of us had.  Even though my sister understands that this expectation of her grandmother would be selfish on her part, there’s something that still hurts from a missed opportunity.

 

I picked up needles and yarn and began knitting swatches, just to practice.  Maybe I could be the one to pick up on this tradition that my grandmother started.  I’ve learned to bake her cinnamon rolls, why couldn’t I learn to knit like her?

 

I can no longer sit next to Grandma and learn the stitches.  But I’ve been stitching away!  And now I’m on my way to carrying on the tradition.  Hopefully, my sister will be pleased when she receives her afghan (if I can actually make one)….and my dog is already pleased to wear her new sweaters.

 

 

*Recipe

City Chicken   (not really chicken at all)

1/2 lb. pork
1/2 lb. veal
1 egg, beaten
Bread crumbs (seasoned if you want)
1 c. milk

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Cut pork and veal into 1" cubes. Thread on bamboo or wooden skewers, alternating chunks of pork and veal. Dip the skewers in the egg, then the bread crumbs, to coat. Saute until browned. Put skewers in a baking pan, and add milk. Cover in foil, and bake about 1 hour. During the depression, chicken was more expensive than pork. So pork and veal were substituted for and "passed off" as chicken. The pork and veal are alternated on a wooden skewer such that it resembles a chicken leg.

 

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