Wow! It’s been three years already since I had the honor of finishing up a project for a grandmother who passed away. You can read about it in the previous post: A Project Left Behind.
Towards the end of November this year, the same family approached me about knitting another Christmas stocking for their fourth and final child. They would provide grandma’s project bag and pattern book, with the selected stocking pattern.
The challenge this time…getting it finished before Christmas…and maybe the detail of the pattern. Challenge accepted.
I took stock of the yarn remaining in the grandmother’s project bag. There were remnants of red and brown, and plenty of white yarn. The pattern called for red, green, brown and grey. Hmmm. Looking at my own stash of yarn, I had plenty of red, green and brown to supplement what was needed. And a thought came to my mind, there needed to be something from grandma in this stocking. Not just the pattern from her pattern book; there needed to be a little bit more. Instead of using grey yarn, which the pattern called for, I’d use grandma’s white yarn.
With the skills that I acquired when knitting the first stocking three years ago to today, I hoped it would be smooth sailing. One thing that was somewhat intimidating, the consistent color changing. I knew that would be time consuming.
The beginning moved pretty quickly.
The color changing with the reindeer slowed me down slightly.
But I trudged my way through, then came to the bottom border, with even more color changing.
This section seemed to take forever to get through…and there was one day I had to put it aside and do something else to come back to it with fresh eyes.
Once I got through the bottom border, I worked my way through the heel and onto the foot.
And the amount of duplicate stitching (stitching on top of other stitches), I breezed through stitching the name at the top.
Done, with time to spare. Sunday, December 22, I hand delivered the stocking to the family, who was so excited and grateful to have the final piece to their set…and something from their grandmother to cherish forever.
(the two I knit are on the right)