Knitwit

I learned to knit at a young age, from the mom of my mom.  I learned to cast on from a young age as well, from a friend, with bright yarn and sticks you use to write.  I do not think I can do this short word thing for much more time.  It was nice while it...lasted.

I've always considered myself reasonably crafty, but two years of learning about producerism in history have made me realize that I am nowhere near artisan level.  Apart from my thus-derived shame, the greater influences on my latest artistic endeavor were the holiday jingles bringing life and hot chocolate to Walmart's otherwise droll atmosphere (I was there getting ingredients for my brother's rooster costume).  I once again had my ultimate fantasy of retiring, knitting, and binging on Korean dramas as I bathed in the glow of red ornaments and Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You."  In this daze, I ended up spending over forty dollars on yarn skeins, needles, and rooster supplies.  

I refused to let this high-cost project join my past knitting attempts (forever incomplete).  I found a pattern for a hat that was basically a stout scarf seamed together, and began knitting a hat for the most important person in my life.  Several thousand stitches and three days later, I triumphantly donned my first hat and mentally prepared myself to start knitting for lesser humans.

Over Thanksgiving break, I changed scenes a little, and flew to Germany.  I knitted for six hours straight on the plane, trying to ignore the fact that the lady next to me had two carry-on dogs, one of which had its own seat, and the other of which was attempting to crawl into my bag.  I watched two romance movies, one Indian and one Chinese, but the visual strain of knitting and watching was too great, and I settled for listening to Justin Bieber and Maroon 5, and knitting with my eyes closed.

As we traversed the bars of Germany night after night, I rejoiced whenever the adults finally decided to settle on a bar.  There I would perch, extract my knitting, and repeat my ribbing mantra: knit, knit, purl, purl, knit, knit, purl purl.  With each subsequent hat (I finished three hats in Germany), I noticed things about the pattern that helped me to stop making mistakes, and I truly felt like my knitting was going places.  One of the adults on the trip noted during one such bar hop, "Gloria seems to live on a higher plane than us.  It's probably the knitting.  She has reached knitting nirvana, and now she's just looking down at us humans."  I laughed a bit, but then nodded wisely in order to perpetuate my holy aura.

Honestly, I'm starting to tire of hats.  Or at least, hats the way I've been making them.  40 hours spent with the same pattern was in its own way adrenaline-filled and rewarding, but I want to branch out.  It doesn't help that 10 of those hours were lost when I misplaced my blue-and-green hat in the bustling food court of O'Hare airport while devouring a huge burrito bowl.  I still have a passion for yarn, and the addictive nature of knitting, and I have more than enough hat requests lined up for the year, but perhaps I'll branch out into something like mittens or hats with videogame characters on them in good time.

Here's a compilation of my lovely models in various poses of approval.

The Transfiguration Toddler

My youngest brother is many things. For Halloween, he was a dragon one day, with a stuffed pantyhose tail and aluminum foil spikes, and a lizard the next, wearing a sparkly green acrobatics costume from dance recitals past. On normal days, he’s a sweet-faced demon determined to make me miserable. And now, they tell me, he’s going to be a rooster (insert obligatory “They told me I could be anything so I became a rooster” meme here). 

At the tender age of three and three-quarters, my brother has already morphed through a more diverse range of species than most birders witness in their lifetimes (and 97% of statistics are made up). You may wonder why this is.  And I would regale you with an intense tale of gender roles and the arts, of belonging and passions. Why keep that lovely scenario in the hypothetical? That’s what I’m asking!

My family dances.  I started pretty late with hip hop when I was eight, but my first brother began his short-lived acrobatics career at the age of five.  Both of us were born with the rhythm of a dancer in our veins -- I danced along to the whirrs of a printer as a child, and we now battle along to hip hop beats and Kpop together.  Then came the third child, and tried as he did to find his inner rhythm, all it resulted in was pain for the family watching.

Despite his natural limitations, my youngest brother came to dance one summer day and I let him try out a pair of tap shoes in the lost and found.  He delighted in the unwieldy clicks and slams that came from the metal plates, and we figured that it was time for the youngest lime to have a chance in the dancing scene.  We enrolled him in the only class available for three-year-olds: Fairytale Ballet and Tap.  As the name might imply, the class was filled with wispy, blonde-haired, pink-clad girls with lovely big eyes and the most charming smiles.  And then there was my brother, in all of his manly, dark-haired, small-eyed glory.  

Now, he's going to be a rooster, and I have been enlisted to create his headpiece.  He doesn't seem to realize that he's the only one not wearing a leotard during class, but he just might notice that he's not wearing a frilly chicken costume once showtime comes around.  I have faith in his versatility to crow among the squawks.

In case you were wondering what my little master actually looks like, here he is, in more or less the order of the limes above (other than the rooster, for obvious reasons).  And here are some extras I found while flipping through my paparazzi collection.  Honestly, I think my brother is the cutest and I hope he never changes.  But apparently that's not going to happen anytime soon.