Looking Back: Bonding while learning to knit

Preface: This story is a chapter from my childhood memoir that spans 1950 to 1964 when my parents, Bill and Anne Haug, owned a bar on Bigfork’s Electric Avenue. 

Despite her independence, Mom had a domestic streak. 

From the age of three, she was raised in a Danish Children’s Home, where she learned to sew, knit, crochet, make lace, and embroider, as well as cook, clean, and make beer.

In the early 1940s she purchased a brand new electric Singer Featherweight sewing machine, all gleaming black painted with delicate gold designs, shiny filigreed nickel face plates, and a lightweight wood carrying case. 

After I came along, she not only made her own clothes, but also most of mine - often mother-daughter dresses. She seldom used a pattern, just another garment as a guide. In our afternoons at home, before I was old enough to go to school, I pulled up my chair so I could watch the sewing machine needle go up and down, creating those tiny, secure stitches in the fabric. I felt a special bond with her when we were sewing, as though those stitches bound us together too.

As winter approached, she sat in her rocking chair, knitting sweaters for us while her cigarette smoke curled upward in the light from her floor lamp. I sat nearby on the couch, watching her two needles clicking away as the garment grew in length below the needles.

“Look, Momma, I’m knitting too,” I chirped as I wound some yarn around one of the needles and then transferred them, one by one, to the other needle. But despite my yearning to knit, my effort never grew below the needle as it did for her.

She chuckled, “Before you start school, Sugar, I’ll teach you how it’s really done.” I could hardly wait.

First I learned the knit stitch, which I did row after row. This was called ‘garter stitch.’ Sometimes, my work got wider and wider as I somehow added stitches in each row; or it got narrower because I dropped stitches or accidentally stitched two together. I knew it wasn’t supposed to get wider and narrower, so I laid it down in frustration.

“What’s wrong, Sugar?” she asked when she noticed the scrunched expression on my face.

“I’m doing something wrong, Momma,” I responded, shoving the project closer to her. She knit to the end of her own row, set it down and picked up mine to inspect. When she spotted the problem, she duplicated my error so I could see what I’d done wrong, then showed me how to correct it. She advised I count my stitches on every row.

“OK Momma, I think I got it,” I said, reaching for my needles. Everything went along wonderfully until I forgot to count, and pretty soon I’d notice it getting wider or narrower. But eventually I was able to keep my rows consistent.

“I think you’re ready to learn how to purl,” she announced one day after inspecting my work.

“What’s that, Momma?”

She showed me her work, which was stockinette stitch. “Do you see how on this side, the stitches form little Vs, row after row, but when I turn it over, this side is little bars, alternating high and low?”

“I see Momma; the back side looks like garter stitch.”

“Well, yes, but if you stretch your garter stitch lengthwise, you will see that between the rows of bars are rows of Vs.”

“Oh ya, Momma, I see that. How come that happens when I knit every row the same?”

“A-ha, Sugar, you see the secret. The front side of the knit stitch is a ‘V’ and the back side is the bar. In order to have only Vs on one side and bars on the other side, you knit one row (to make the Vs) and then you do a different stitch, the purl, on the next row, to make the bars.”

“Oh,” I said, pondering this. “Is purl a different stitch than knit?”

“Well, sort of. It’s really a knit stitch but done backwards.” She picked up my work to demonstrate, then continued. “When you do the knit stitch, the yarn is carried on the back of your work, and you pull it through each stitch from back to front, like this. Do you see Sugar?”

“Uh huh,” I responded, mesmerized.

“But when you do the purl stitch, the yarn is carried on the front, and you pull it through each stitch from front to back like this,” she said, demonstrating.

“Let me try, Momma!”

After several tries, I finally got it. Then she taught me ribbing, which is knit one, purl one, or knit two, purl two, across the row. Before I knew it, I’d made my first stocking cap; then mittens, but they turned out funny. While the first one fit my right hand perfectly, the one for my left hand was almost big enough for Daddy. Still, I wore them to school after our first snow and showed them off proudly to Miss Reep, my first grade teacher.