Menokreatikkul; Saturday Stitches

A Brief History of YAM Yarning

It will have escaped the notice of none of you, dear readers, that crochet is my 'thang'... I love to hook with yarn of all types. All my aunts - and two uncles - knitted. One grandmother crocheted. Learning to knit was derigeur. Ever the one to break away, I remember learning to crochet most. It was the one thing that brought me closer to my father's mother, who was something of a difficult personality. Not known for her patience, she seemed transformed when it came to sharing her craft. Whereas my mother, a patient woman in so many respects, was not the most patient of teachers, whether in school subjects, sewing, or wool crafts. It is partly because of that often very critical voice that, to this day, I have no interest or desire to sew. It is also that voice which interrupted my knitting career. Having completed a quite fine fisherman's sweater for my boyfriend at that time (which he wore often and cheerfully), she couldn't help but tell me how it could have been improved... That was nearly forty years ago, and I haven't lifted knitting pins since.

When I inherited the stash of mum's homespun and other yarns, I also got all her knitting paraphernalia. So many knitting pins and bits. Aitch is a knitter, and she gladly received a lot of the better items. My mother would be thrilled to know she had them. There were quite a few doubles and oddments left over, though, so they went to the charity store. There was one pair of wood pins, size 10mm (large), that, for sentimental reasons, I held onto. They have resided in my main accoutrement bag for years, and I have occasionally cursed them for being in the way. They stick out/up and somehow always manage to catch my sleeves, no matter how careful I am. Ghosts, haunting me.

...And then...

The new year of 2026 came, and I realised that I had lost track of what exactly I had in my yarn stash. I do have quite a stash still sitting in The Grey. I probably need to bring that all upstairs to the Hutch to have a proper inventory. That said, I have a good grasp of what's down there. However, I hadn't really checked my cupboard upstairs in quite some time. Make that years. More than one makes it multiple. Even when I did go in there (maybe eighteen months back), it was only to retrieve one bag in particular with all the single and part-skeins that I wanted to use up. What I had stored in the three large boxes and four large bags was now something of a mystery or, at best, a vague memory.

Out it all came and now sits all over my lounge. I have a lot of yarn, and I need to be busy! One lot I recalled having bought with Mac1 in mind for a cardigan. That has been produced (you'll see it when she has). It was crocheted and surprisingly quickly made (three evenings).  I had a bit of the darker teal and a tiny amount from the brown alpaca left over from my recent wrap and decided it wasn't enough to crochet a beanie, but.... wait for it... remembering that knitting uses less yarn, I picked up those pesky wooden pins...

It's a bit of a novelty! I wasn't even sure I remembered how to cast on - a quick reminder via that great training facility, the tubular channel, it was like a duck to water. 

Imagine my surprise/shock/consternation, then, when, at the bottom of the largest of the three containers, there was not just yarn, but a tie-top bag containing a whole set of knitting pins, covering most of the sizes required for just about all projects.

How the heck did that get there??? I do not recall ever placing it there. I recognised it as having come from the Edinburgh haul, but I was sure I had passed on all the good stuff to Aitch. Without a word of a lie, I sat baffled, holding that thing for quite some time. It's a total blank. Apart from a few 'ring-ins', the bulk of the needles is definitely a set. They are all of the same type and all in their individual sleeves within the tie-top. They are all steel and clearly quite new. Probably never actually used by my mother. Whether she had ordered them herself or whether they had been a gift to her also remains unanswered. She quite possibly did order them herself. Right up until those last few weeks when she had to go to the hospice, she had something on pins being worked. Working with wool (and other yarns) was her absolute passion. It was also, I suspect, something of a therapy for her and the one thing that kept her together as cancer ate her up. I wouldn't have put it past her to have ordered those pins to feed that need...

Signs And Portents?

Dilemma. Was this (and that impetuous use of the wooden nuisances) some kind of sign? Having made the little beanie, I remembered that knitting was, anyway, never going to be my first love, because it required a slightly different arm position, and I was reminded of my arthritic shoulders and spine. I would never be able to sit for several hours on one project like I do with crochet. Had I squirrelled away the bag simply because it was a full set and in one container? Was it because I couldn't let go of my mother's legacy entirely?

Truly, after two weeks of pondering, I am no closer to remembering how the dickens that bag of pins got into that box of yarn. What I haven't done is seek to add it to the charity pile. Despite the blank, they had been kept for some reason. Maybe, just maybe, twelve years back, when doing the clearout of her cupboards, I heard mum's voice saying, "It's okay now, you can do it just fine"...

Whatever. Among my stash is yarn I bought myself over forty years ago, which has travelled all the way to OZ, been stored there, and returned here. It's time it got used!!! Some very fine pure Shetland wool got cast onto the 3mm pins... 

Aitch spotted it on one of our video chats. What had started as just a play around found a purpose, so she will be getting a scarf in the not-too-distant future. YAM being Yamini, she couldn't just do a simple stocking stitch to get back in the two-pin groove. Oh no. This is a basic lace-stitching pattern: yarn over, knit a stitch, pass yarn off. It gives a loose ribbing effect that is very elastic and slightly 'boucle'. 

Crikey! I could indeed hear mother's voice, but it was laughing, delighted that I had rediscovered this other yarn craft. Am I converting back? No. Crochet is my true skill and will always be my main craft - but now you can expect, once in a while, to be told of a project that is made with two pins, rather than one hook.