Knitting through the decades

By rights our Great British daffodils should have brightened Easter Bank Holiday, but it's still so cold here they couldn't quite bring themselves to open and who could blame them?!  If the weather had been a little warmer, a walk might would have been on our agenda for the weekend but chill winds defeated us, so instead I settled into my armchair with my latest knitting project, a cotton cardigan for the Spring ... that's if it ever arrives of course!

Spring 2013, my new knitting project!

I'm knitting a lovely textured pattern by Kim Hargreaves in Rowan's 'hand knit cotton' in the hope that when it's finished I will be able to wear it over t-shirts and jeans. Fingers crossed it fits when it's completed - it's been years since I knitted myself anything to wear!

1988 with my son at Chessington Zoo

Since I wrote my last sentence I couldn't resist hunting in the loft for old photo albums ... thankfully there aren't many pics of me wearing my own hand knits, but I did find a couple of 'interesting' ones to entertain you with!  The 'dog-tooth' mohair jacket in the photo above, taken with my son (also wearing one of my knits) on a visit to Chessington Zoo, was quite a corker and the over-sized pink 'basket weave' jacket below has haunted me for many a long year since I knitted it in 1988 and wore it for my daughter's 5th birthday trip to London Zoo with my mum on a bitterly cold March day ... as I recall there wasn't much sign of Spring then either! 

Visiting London Zoo with Mum and my kids, back in 1988

I first taught myself to knit in 1982 at the tender age of nineteen ... my Mum always had a knitting project on the go, but had no success teaching me, a hopeless leftie, so when my first baby was due, I borrowed an instruction book and battled through my frustration to knit some warm baby clothes ... and now, thirty one years later, I still have my knitting needles beside my armchair ready for use.  Let's hope I finish the Kim Hargreaves' cardigan I've just started, so that in thirty years I will be able to remember it as fondly as my earlier hand knitted jackets ... let's also hope the design doesn't date quite as quickly as that blue mohair dog tooth check jacket!