Free Knitting Pattern - Thursday (sorry it's late)

Half of the LG clan was struck with a flu bug that prevented us from posting Thursday's & Friday's pattern. Luckily this flu didn't stop Kiki from knitting this great sweater. Yet another beautiful Mission Falls 1824 sweater.

It has these cool little designs along the left of Kiki's heart and other organs.

It is called "Pump-Organ Heart", named after an amazing song by the fantastic David Garza.

Luckily the flu didn't keep us from City Bakery, our usual weekend haunt, where we enjoyed this cupcake that was almost too pretty to eat. It was chocolate, so pretty lost out. Sorry the flu kept this next pattern from you for a few days. So here it is with Kiki's introduction.

Presenting the Winchester Toboggan

I learned so much when I went to college. I'm not talking here about what I had to know in order to pass my classes, but what I learned in dorm rooms, over lunch tables and in hallways. For instance, I was shocked that other people knew the Cajun folk songs that I was sure that my father had made up on the spot to entertain my siblings and myself when we were children. I did know that it was a little odd for my mother to live in an old school, complete with a basketball court-sized gymnasium in the basement, but I was surprised to learn that my new friends washed dishes, walked the family dog, and ran the vacuum as their after-school chores. Part of growing up in the Hall household meant "doing hinges" in the afternoon or evening. There were six children in my family (I am daughter number four, after me is one brother and another sister), and we must have made millions of these hinges over the course of about 25 years.

We had to make three boxes every night, a few hundred individual hinges at a time. Lining them up perfectly, counting and recounting, was a lot like the rhythm of knitting, now that I think about it. When I was in high school, Stephen used to come over and help me to finish my share so that we could go out and join friends for a video or pizza. Later, I guess, we must have used the time to kiss and exchange love letters, but that seems a little far-fetched these days. {Completely off subject: I watched Zeffirelli's version of the classic Romeo and Juliet the other night, and for the first time, I saw not a tale of love and passion, but one of utmost stupidity. Stupid kids. Should have listened to their parents. Or at least they could have waited five minutes and asked someone what was going on....I suddenly had this image of poor Shakespeare, tearing his hair out and later turning in his grave that so many people misinterpreted his work. The nightmare of every artist blown into a cultural archetype.} Steve may have found the hinges a little weird, but he grew up on a farm, and one of his jobs was to hold the male hogs as they were castrated, so he couldn't really say anything.

Anyway, these weren't regular hinges; the kind used for doors or furniture. No, not in our family. Our greasy silver hinges adorn thousands of caskets. That's right. Coffins. The kind that people choose as their final resting place. Casket making is the family business. My grandfather got into it when my father was young, and nearly everyone in the family has participated in some way. For a long time, Stephen was the only son-in-law who didn't work there. My father and one of my sisters still work there now, and as empty-nesters at long last, my dad and stepmom have to make the hinges alone now. As children, my brother and I would go to the deserted casket factory with our father on Saturdays. We would poke around the darkened, oily rooms while Dad sat in the office catching up on paperwork. Dad would use the intercom and spooky voices to try to scare us. We just laughed, and then join him to raid the soda machine in the breakroom (where my dad would try to avert our eyes from the sexy calendars on the walls). There were even times when we painted our bicycles in the big vats of glittery casket paint.

These stories amazed my college classmates, but to me they were just part of every day life. Other "ordinary" aspects of this life include using the tops of slightly irregular caskets for sleds in the winter (three children fit perfectly), and the tiny coffin that served as a beer cooler at the company softball games.

Like Stephen and his farm chores, it is amazing what humans can grow used to over time, or accept as a fact of life simply because they have never experienced a different perspective. Discovering, experiencing, and celebrating that diversity is what made me decide to switch from a journalism degree to a double major of anthropology and sociology. I have never been sorry. Later, that same line of thinking (shared, fortunately, by my husband) was what led us to enroll our little four-year-old children in a French school with no English spoken until they reached first grade. Again, no regrets.

It is not unusual for people who are first experiencing life outside of their birthplace to encounter shock and confusion as they realize just how far the safe confines of their upbringing have been stretched. I am often reminded of the words of Czeslaw Milosz, who said, "Language is the only homeland". I love that. Taken out of your native environment, you may have to get used to new foods, strange customs, and a different climate, but one of the things that stays with you is your language. Even as you acquire the necessary linguistic skills to get along in your new home, the words you first learned as representative symbols of objects and emotions stick with you like the voice of your grandmother (or like her cooking), and these words can soothe you even in the most alien of environments.

It is not as though Stephen and I went to a foreign country to study. We just went to Butler University in Indianapolis, which is only about 100 miles from where we lived in Randolph County. We grew up in Winchester, a small Indiana town very near the Ohio border. Most of the people we met at college were from other towns, small and large, in the Midwest, but there were still many, many differences between us. Of course we met students and professors from all over the world, but with them we looked for common ground. Part of that anthropological training involved learning just how much every segment of humanity shares with every other.

Still, what amazed me most was how different seemingly similar people could be. My new girlfriends said "stockings" instead of "hose", and "rolls" instead of "buns" (I'm talking about pastry here). That was funny to me, but nothing compared to the events of the first cold days during my freshman year.

I have, throughout my entire life, never been able to stand the wind blowing in my ears. Now, faced with long walks across an open campus between the dorm, library, dining hall, and labs, I decided to shirk fashion. I pulled out the warmest hat I could find and smothered my huge hair with it (it was the early 90's, and big bangs were never big enough).

Stephen laughed at me, but I was used to that, and at least he wasn't embarrassed to walk me to lunch. There, in the overheated dining hall, I found my usual seat. Micah (from Madison, Wisconsin) and Becca (from Chicago), both asked why I was wearing a "stocking cap". What? Stephen and I looked at each other. What was that? We asked other friends, from New York and Ohio. They all said either "stocking cap" or "ski cap". We were perplexed. Hadn't anyone heard of a "toboggan"? "You mean the sled?" Jeff asked. What did he know? He was from Indianapolis, the Big City. But then we realized that even other small-town Hoosiers had no idea what we were saying.

How could that be? EVERYONE we knew said "toboggan": our families, our friends, our old school teachers. No one used any other term for a knitted hat, not ever. Steve and I asked hundreds of people over the course of the next ten years. We discovered that the word "toboggan" used as phrasing to describe a hat was particular to Randolph County and seemed to be a uniquely Winchesterian term.

Our children, both born and reared in that big city of Indianapolis, switch back and forth between "toboggan" and "knit cap" to just plain old "hat", and it all means the same thing to them; something to warm the head. But my girls are bilingual and probably think of the word "chapeaux" first when they see hats anyway...

Steve and I had not thought of the toboggan conflict for quite a while. We used the word "toboggan" at home, but would say "knit hat" or "knit cap" in public to spare confusion. Then, we moved to Phoenix a year ago and thought that the whole thing was a non-issue when the temperatures rarely plunge low enough to warrant wearing a hat of any kind, unless it is a straw hat to keep the sun from frying you. Never underestimate the dictates of fashion. One day last fall we met up with a new friend at our favorite knitting store. She was relatively new to knitting, and was excited about making her first "beanie". WHAT?!?!?! Stephen looked at me and we both started to laugh. How in the world could THAT word mean a knitted hat? Honestly. A "beanie" is something a cartoon character would wear - a short cap striped like half of a beachball, the kind with a propellor (or "propeller", if you prefer the modern spelling) on top. We thought we had discovered another anomaly in the world of hatwear. We just thought that her family, Arizona natives, came up with the word as a joke.

But then, our daughters started coming home with the SAME story, over and over again. Kids on the playground were wearing "beanies", even when it was warm outside. Stephen and I would quiz the girls as to the birthplace of these strange-talkers (we are WAAAAAAAY too interested in this subject, let me tell you). Who would say "beanie"? "I think they are from" at this point the girls would pause and whisper, "Ar-i-zon-a!"

Soon, every knitter we met was knitting up a quick "beanie" or two, and these knitters were not only from Arizona. Some were native Californians. At first, we were sure the term must only apply to cute baby hats, but nooooo. Even manly husbands who would wear no other handknits were willing, even eager, to don something called a BEANIE!!!

Well. Stephen and I have decided to embrace our roots, however obscure, and Take Back the Toboggan! After all, we may have learned to say "eye-ther" instead of "ee-ther", and to drink "soda" instead of "pop", but the line must be drawn. In the name of cultural diversity and Linguistic Anthropologists everywhere, we humbly submit our attempt at infiltrating the language of headgear.

Here it is, in all of its glory: The Winchester Toboggan.

cjh16nov05

And don't forget to
Tie It,

Click It,

Or Strap It!

And tomorrow's preview...

Steve

p.s. thanks Kiki for making our blog bigger than the sidebar again.