The story behind our Knitcushion pattern
Once upon a time, many scarves ago, there was a woman who was lonely. It was summer and it had been a long, lonely summer. She lived on a farm in a big farmhouse. Her husband had died that spring. She found him one Friday evening in mid May, sprawled out in the yard by the barn. He’d collapsed while out feeding the few beef cows that he’d brought back to the farm after he sold the milking herd.
Stolen from her that weekend were her husband, the farmer who missed his animals, and the possibility of golden years together. She didn’t know how to drive a car. She’d been his partner and helpmate for years. Through days and months of milking cows, morning and night, they’d forged a bond. They’d shocked grain together. They’d brought in hay together. They’d done so much of the making of a small farm together and now he was gone.
As you, my dear reader, might imagine, this is not a fictional account of two people. These people are my grandparents, Bill and Rose Luedtke. Grandpa Bill died at a fairly young age – he was in his mid sixties. Left behind and alone, my Grandma Rose determined to do things she'd never done before.
She learned to drive a car. She earned her first driver’s license. And she learned how to knit.
How I remember her learning to knit! She would drive the thirty or so miles from the farm to our house. Since Grandma had just learned how to drive, she’d come during the week and toward midday when the traffic wasn’t so bad.My mother, her only child, showed her how to cast on, knit, and purl. Grandma caught on easily, but was hard on herself. One mistake and she’d pull out the entire swatch she was knitting and knit it all over again. Once I saw her discard the wadded up knitting – needles and all – and toss it behind her as she sat on the window seat in our dining room. Never one to give up, she took the knitting home and the next week when she returned, the yarn was knit again.
Her Germanic background kept her from wasting anything, so the pulled out yarn was knit again and again until the stitches were clean and aligned and right.
Then mother taught her how to follow a pattern. She learned to cable and soon sweaters were flying off her needles. Somewhere in those years of knitting she made a pincushion for me. Made from four colors of yarn and knit of concentric bands of garter stitch, the pincushion was cleverly held together by large corsage pins that pierced the sides and met in the center to form a stabilizing grid.
Grandma Rose’s pincushion comes to life again in this pattern. I’ve christened this version “Knitcushion” and hope that as you knit these little gems you will think of the tenacity and just plain stubborness that is given to us by our mothers and grandmothers. As they faced tough and lonely times, they learned new skills and adjusted to new ways. And they knit. Hours spent with needles and yarns and stitches brought solace and retreat from the problems of the day.
“In the rhythm of the needle there is music for the soul,” says a sampler quote. So it is when we knit. We find soothing moments and we create delightful, useful items like this Knitcushion.
Pattern download: Knitcushion by Graywood Designs