Knitting Stories

Love letter to a sweater

Why must love be something we fall into? After all it doesn’t sit below us. With you, it felt more like somewhere we climbed to. There was no falling with us. When I think of how we became, it was like we got wrapped and twisted into love. I pulled you over my head into love and pushed my arms through your sleeves into love.

There were signs from early on: you gave me that ring, a blue stain of indigo wrapped around my yarn-tensioning index finger that stayed there until I cast off. I only noticed it was gone weeks later when the smudge of blue-black ink from my fountain pen looked somehow alone without it’s old indigo ring friend.

But things had changed between us by then. When we began, I was the lonely new girl at school who spent Friday nights babysitting for yarn money, knitting in the gloom of that standard lamp watching, VHS tape fims with the sliver of static at the top of the screen.

Of course things changed. It was bound to be like that, once I’d cast off and sewn up. Patterns for that Rowan denim yarn were based on shrinking the knitted pieces into shape before you sewed them together. The fabric came out of the washing machine altered, the stitches firmed up and slightly faded – the indigo leached, especially around the edge of those cables that climbed up the yoke. But that’s not the change I really mean.

I’d finished sewing up the night before. The next morning, the pretty girl who took the same train to school as me every morning, spoke to me for the first time. She looked at me and said, ‘Nice Sweater.’ I beamed shyly and looked sideways at my reflection in the train window. She was right. You were a blooming fantastic sweater!

Warm against the cold and timelessly cool against the tide of all those terrible late 1980s fashions, you wrapped me in a love that took away the stranded feeling I carried in my school bag when that term began. Together we made it through hideous drunken teenage houseparties, freezing cold geography field trips, Wednesday afternoon free periods on the Heath, roller coaster pashy crushes, and even the exams at the end which I was sure would defeat me.

Your seams held firm even through university and beyond and the cables carried on fading, but your cuffs eventually began to fray. So I used the extra length of your ageing sleeves to roll up and protect those battered edge stitches, now white since the indigo had long ago worn off.

Perhaps I should have said more at the time, but if ever there was a time to say the things that don’t play well in daylight, surely it’s the silent insomniac hours of a freezing 14th February night – an amnesty for tardy letter-writers and nostalgic sweater knitters, so they can finally send the one most long-overdue.

Me and my Rowan Denim Sweater love ca1992