Unless you're on Ravelry or have been watching me knit, you might - or might not, as I don't expect people to pay me that much attention - have noticed that there has been a finished object that I did not blog about.
This is because the idea came to me quite suddenly and happily, and I did not quite want the intended recipient - well, the Mummy thereof, as the recepient is still rather small and not quite up to using computers or reading blogs - to see her surprise on my blog until she received it. Happily I received an email from her yesterday telling me that she had, and that she was very happy. So happy that she blogged about it!
I'm from a large family. Not that my immediate family is large, but everything around it is. On my mother's side alone I am the fifteenth of thirty grandchildren. I don't know where I am on my father's side, as my dad is one of thirteen children, but I don't let that bother me. Largely because I don't care, and my mum's side is way more fun, which is why we cousins all hung out a lot when we were growing up. Some of us were close, some of us weren't. Some alliances were made and stood, and some didn't. But that's just family dynamics.
What sometimes happens, when you grow up, is that people change in ways you don't expect - and the sooner my mother understands this about me, the better - and this is what my cousin Mrika has found out about me: I've gone crafty. She is right. I never really showed any aptitude for crafting unless you count counted cross-stitch, until I took up knitting. Photography isn't quite the same thing, and given how many artists, architects, graphic designers and interior designers there are on my mum's side, you could say that "the Craft is strong in this one". Except, you know, it's a family thing. A whole family of Crafting Jedi. It was just a while before I obtained the Craft.
Meanwhile, I've learned new things about her; about how she's an artist working from home making interior decorations, hand-made cards and gift bags, taking care of her kids herself instead of doing what most people back home do, which is have a live-in maid. What makes me happy about that is that living here in England, the whole live-in maid deal just doesn't happen. I already have had various cousins and aunts wondering how on earth I would cope without any help, and yet, here is Mrika, doing it all on her own and still doing the art she loves.
So, after many years of not being terribly close, we find that we're very similar, in philosophy and intent.
Now then: see these colours?
Dream in Color Classy, in clockwise from left Spring Tickle, Cool Fire, Chinatown Apple and most of a skein of Ruby River.
What happened was,I read this post on Mrika's blog way back when she was still expecting Baby Z. And I saw the colours she'd picked out for Baby Z's room and I thought, Funny. I've seen those colours before. As it turned out, two of those colours were in my stash and the other two were, well, in Stash. I misremembered the colours at first, and nearly picked out a deeper red and a gold to go with the Spring Tickle green, but I loaded the photo up on the shop computer and finally picked the right colours.If you look at the post I linked to at the beginning of this post, you can see photos of Baby Z's nursery following the photos of this Tulip cardigan.
Now, here was sort of my conundrum: I am from a large family. I would have thought that the general ruling was, you knit for one, you knit for all. And as by and large such efforts can go completely unappreciated, I was never going to commit to knitting for anyone apart from myself or perhaps - if I were quick enough - anyone else who also knit and would therefore appreciate the time and effort that had gone into their gift.
Mrika is, to me, rather different. Because she herself makes things. Not in the same way that I do, but she, too, would spend time agonizing over colours, working out textures, shapes and drapes. The joy was not only in the aesthetics but also in the process of achieving those aesthetics.
And anyway, I have always wanted to make a Tulip cardigan, and this was a pretty good excuse.
This is the first ever garment I have ever made. I've made a blanket, a hat, scarves, socks, and now currently, lace, but not something that could actually be worn. I remember squeeing with such gleeful silliness when I first put the armhole stitches on waste yarn to hold them, and after a few rounds the cardigan started to look like a cardigan. I ran around showing everybody, dammit.
And I remember as I knit thinking about the colours: the sweetness of cotton-candy pink, the zing of the spicy cinnamon, the eternal youth of spring green, and to round it off, the richness of the precious deep ruby pink. I remember thinking, You're going to be a very interesting little girl.
The Atiya Tulip.
Of course, I was aware that I was knitting a wool cardi for a baby who is living in tropical Malaysia. But again, because it's this one cousin and not any other, I figured that having the cardi in the colours that she had inadvertantly picked out was enough. I had no expectations that Baby Z would wear it, the poor thing, but I knew that it would be part of her early life, perhaps hanging in her nursery along with the paper cranes and the beautiful artwork her clever mummy had painted for her.
As for the pattern itself, it's fun and dead-easy, and I had a great time making attached i-cord. The Atiya Tulip was also part of a small revolution. A lot of the time people lose interest in the pattern because the original calls for 8 different colours, which means buying 8 skeins of yarn unless you can get a kit. But between me and Diane, we've made a four-colour Tulip and two two-colour Tulips, and now the possibilities seem utterly endless.
Though, come to think of it, I do worry that one day Baby Z will grow up and wonder why her mummy has a crazy knitting cousin who made her a wool cardigan to wear in a tropical country....
Oh well. Every family has a crazy knitting somebody, right?
And Mrika: you're welcome, and thank you for giving me the inspiration to make it in the first place.
