Pattern: Cuddlesome

Yarn: Swish DK, color- ‘Cornmeal’

She is around a week old in the first set of pictures and 7 weeks in the second.  What a difference just a bit of time makes!  This is the knitting project I was working on when I went into labor.  I had nothing but one wee mitt left and delusions of it being her first outfit.  The yarn is superwash after all (a very odd choice for me!), so if I finished by a certain point, there would still be time to wash it and have it ready to clothe a new babe.  At some point I made the choice to stop working on it.  I knew I was being ridiculous.  I often am.  I’m sensible enough to recognize when I’m being ridiculous, but not quite sensible enough to stop myself from being so in the first place.  I could have continued to knit.  I was still capable of it, but I chose to let go.  Other things were more important at the time.  Nothingness mostly, allowing myself to be totally lost in time and space.

When I did pick it back up again, a couple of days later, I found a tiny hole in that wee mitt.  I suspect I had been in the middle of a stitch when a contraction came on and after holding it in my lap as I breathed my way through, I must have picked it back up and knit the same stitch again without realizing I had failed to slip the last stitch off the needle.  I recognize that particular flaw from the children’s knitting when they were first learning.  They would get distracted halfway through and suddenly a perfect little hole, accompanied by an extra stitch would appear in their work.  I couldn’t figure out how they were doing it at first, until finally I caught one of them in the act and suddenly it all made sense.  I needed only to back track 30 stitches or so to fix it.  It really was no bother at all, but somehow, in my soupy, sappy, postpartum state, I couldn’t bring myself to do that; to take away that little hint of a memory, evidence of such a monumental place and time.  Even though it had absolutely no significance to anyone else, and I’d be sure to remember it just the same.  So the hole remained.  I sewed it up from the inside, you can feel a little bump where the flaw exists.  In those early days I often rubbed it while holding her hand, in something that can only be described as awe.

She is sleeping in this as I type and I know she’ll only get another wear or two out of it, she so very tall already and growing by the day.  I’ll be sad to pack this one away.  It’s somehow like boxing up her newness.