But I am not a selfish knitter. It's probably a good thing, because I already have a goodly number of handknit socks, with no sign of stopping, so it's a good thing I can offload 2/3 of them to either my husband or my mom.
The big sticking point for me and non-selfish knitting is color. I love wild, bright colors, and some of the knitworthy in my life have a... more specific and defined relationship to particular colors. Take my BFF Ryan, who as it turns out, went to high school with fellow blogger Jenny Jo's husband. He's knitworthy (I've made him not one but TWO afghans), and a neutral color sort of guy. I guess I can make that work.
That's him and one of his roosters, and he's sporting a Thorpe hat and some garter stitch mittens. He picked out the yarn himself, and although it's a bit of a struggle for me to work with a marled neutral, I dealt. It was worth it. The whole weekend after I delivered these, he would. not. take. them. off. Well that's not true. He dropped the hat in the arena when we went to the barn where he keeps his horses. He picked it up, dusted it off, and said it had now been christened by the barn. Later he set it on a baby's head to see how cute she'd be in it. He set it on the radiator in his house so it'd be nice and warm when he went out to do the farm chores in the morning. This guy will continue to be knitworthy.
And a bonus? There were enough leftovers to make a second Thorpe for a husband who also found the yarn acceptable to his color palette.
p.s. The penguin enclosure at the St. Louis Zoo is one of my all time happy (though stinky) places.
Yeah, men and their color palettes. The most exciting yarn I've ever given to AJ was Creatively Dyed's "Duck" colorway, and that was for socks, which hardly count as clothing in some ways.
ReplyDelete(Emily has some more adventurous gift-recipients in her life, I do believe.)
I'm not saying that having someone whom you can knit insanely colorful things for and then make them wear it is enough reason, in and of itself, to have kids ... but, it's definitely in the "pros" column for reproduction.
ReplyDeleteAlso, yeah -- Peter has a slightly broader color palatte than your dudes do. He is willing to wear maroon in addition to blue and brown.
I feel you! about the questions of random people do.
ReplyDeleteFew months ago I starting teaching knitting and crochet in groups and there were some perplexion about why I can't knit baby socks (the ones that don't require dpns or circulars) and only 'adult' ones.. The participants of course, were mostly mothers or soon-to-be mothers and they expected that everyone starts to knit when they have kids...
I think it's better to knit for yourself first, because there is always a risk that the item that you have worked hard for might be tossed away or thrown away in a closet by their unappreciating recipient!