July 20, 2005

Knitters do it for love

So I was over chez Lee Ann reading her latest entry (what baby blanket?) when it hit me. That Lee Anne is brave. Really brave. She is not afraid to walk right up to the line and just stand there...wind blowing in her hair, mohair trailing out behind her....spindle and needles held aloft oozing confidence (in both national languages) wearing a tee-shirt that proudly reads "I take knitting risks".
(You thought I was going to say that she was edging up to the crazy line for spinning in bed, didn't ya? Non, non mes petites tricoteuses, a descent into spinning all hours of the day and night with no regard for the appearance of sanity is normal. Lee Ann is right on track with that. I don't consider loosing sleep or spinning in odd places to be strange. I would however feel that she was ready to check in at the Ha-Ha Hilton if she was dropping her spindle off at
Caroline's house, feeling truly that she was bored with it.)

What did she do? What feat of daring-do did she accomplish? How is it that I think she is an extreme knitter?
She knit La Petite Autoritaire (otherwise known as her six year old daughter) a poncho. Not just any poncho, but a poncho with a lace edge in a colour that Lee Ann's daughter selected and Lee Ann affectionately referred to as "pony puke" since it was exactly the variegated series of colours that one would expect to find outside the bar where
Fluttershy My Little Pony got trashed on a Saturday night after finding out that Butterfly Island Pony has been engaged in a filthy pink affair with Twilight Twinkle pony, just because she has sparkles on her arse and he can't just get a hobby like knitting to deal with his fetid little mid-life pony crisis....but I digress.)

Pony1Pony2

(By the way? There is an international "My Little Pony Convention". Who knew?)

She knit this poncho for the small, powerful, arc-en-ciel obsessed one and I respect her for it. I personally have knit things that I didn't like for people that I love, it's all about the sacrifice and I can totally get behind it...but the pony puke poncho was special. The pony puke poncho was so out of the realm of what Lee Ann would usually knit that I actually witnessed her struck senseless by it.
She would push the poncho away on her lap, stare at it and then say "Does this match? I can't even tell if this matches...does the edge colour go with the puke? Is this ok? Is this cute or ugly?" She was actually rendered opinionless by it. That's love.

Now remember that she did all this for someone who is six. I know, I know. Six year olds are charming and little and who wouldn't knit them anything they wanted...but think of this.
They change their minds. They reject things on a whim. They forget they liked pony puke ponchos enough to beg for one, it doesn't matter to them how long you knit on it and they care nothing for your reputation or portfolio as a knitter.

Lee Ann could totally have knit this thing out of the yarn that La Petite Autoritaire selected, and slogged away on it for hours and hours, suffering dizzy spells and nausea from the unaccustomed exposure to a colourway that she would normally...well. Her last sweater was blue. Plain, respectable, upstanding blue and when I met her she was dressed head to toe in black. That's yarn color whiplash just begging for a start and Lee Ann didn't just knit this quietly in the privacy of her own living room where if it all went wrong we could just pretend it never happened..non, non
...M'as te dire quelque chose, she knit it on the internet, in public, in other provinces, at Stitch and Bitches....all for love.

That's brave, because if the little lady had decided to conveniently "forget" that she wanted a rainbow pink poncho, or if she had still wanted a rainbow pink poncho but decided somehow that what Lee Ann had knit was NOT a rainbow pink poncho and refused to wear it out of protest, or if it had been too small or too big or if the neck had been chokey or the hem to swingy or the lace had too many holes or the purple wasn't the same as the purple that she imagined or if she refused to believe that this was indeed a poncho knit from the yarn she had chosen....if any of those things had gone wrong....

It would have been for nothing. Nothing at all. While there's nothing wrong with knitting a pony puke pink and purple petite poncho if it makes you happy....there's a lot of bitterness you'd have to get over if you hated every minute of it and had done it for no reason at all.
That's a knitterly kind of brave.
What will you knit for love? What will you not knit for love? Will you cross your personal line of good taste for the happiness of another?
Well?

Posted by Stephanie at July 20, 2005 10:41 AM