Other places to visit

Order Form

Woolly Thoughts Home

The World of Illusion Knitting

©Woolly Thoughts 2019          Contact Us          

PICKING UP THREADS

This was written in
2007
so is now very dated

Is knitting genetic? Was I born with anything that made me predisposed to knitting? I am the only child of a mother who was also an only child and a father who had a brother, sister and half-sister. As a small child I had fairly frequent contact with my maternal grandparents but very little contact with my paternal grandparents. The only real knitter in this set-up was my maternal grandmother but I cannot claim that there is anything in my make-up that came from her as she was my mother’s stepmother and so there was no bloodline between us. There were definitely no genes from there though her influence certainly played a part.

My mother’s own mother had been a tailoress and dressmaker. I had her Singer treadle sewing machine - until I turned it into a garden table in 1980. Even though she was very young when her own mother died, my mother had inherited, or learned, many sewing skills. These were passed on to me. From a very early age I made clothes for dolls and myself and eventually progressed into making clothes for others, including my mother, when my skills surpassed hers. I made, and altered, clothes for many people and also made toys, soft furnishings and virtually anything else that you can think of that can be made on a sewing machine. I have tried my hand at many, many crafts over the years. Some were quite long-lived but it was knitting, crochet and sewing that were always there in addition to whatever else I might be into. My sewing machine, which is a sophisticated electronic job these days, stands always at the ready, alongside its friend the overlocker.

My mother would be the first to admit she was not a born knitter so I didn’t get it from her.

I have already said that I visited my maternal grandparents from time to time. I have many memories so it seems as though I went there often but I don’t think that was really the case. I know I went to stay with them for a few days during most school holidays and they always came to stay with us at Christmas. They were very old – or so it seemed at the time. I remember being amazed that my grandfather was born while Victoria was still queen. He was a little eccentric! He rode a bike until he was into his eighties. He sometimes had a trailer on the back and used to frequent a scrap yard and come back with items that would ‘come in useful’. Across the bottom of the garden, there was a shed, which was really more like a barn. It was enormous and stuffed full of bits of bikes, sewing machines, radios and the odd family of mice.

What fascinated me most were hundreds and hundreds of keys hanging in bunches from hooks along the beams. I always wondered what use keys were without locks. It was only later that I discovered that he, and my father, could reassemble a lock to fit a key but even that never explained why he had to have so many keys.

My father and grandfather (Remember that this is my maternal grandfather!) had just one thing in common. They both liked to make things. In those days far more people did make things at home but these two were obsessive. As a very small child I had a train set. Perhaps that was a bit unusual for a girl but this was ludicrous as it all started with a discarded engine from the scrap yard. They had the engine so made the tracks, and, when that proved to be a slow process, they made a machine to make the tracks. This would have been in 1951 or 1952 and we lived in a prefab at the time. That track went everywhere!

I was brought up in an environment where people made things and, naturally I joined in. At a tender age I would often have been found banging nails into pieces of wood. Dad and Grandad each had a large wooden shed. Grandad's was an unchanging structure lined with drawers, cupboards and shelves, all labelled in chalk so that he could change the labels when he decided to move something.  Dad’s shed was large but very easy to dismantle. It had to be because he was a policeman and in those days policemen could be told they were being transferred to some other part of the county with only a couple of days notice. In our house the shed was a priority, only slightly less important than the beds which always had to be the first thing in place in the new house.

Fate decreed that, although we had many moves, they were all in and around one small town so the upheaval was not as great as it might have been. It also meant that the same removal firm always turned up to move everything. They came with two vans – one for the stuff from the house and one for the shed. The shed also had its own pile of bricks to stand on. It would have been pointless to give it a more permanent standing as there was no telling when it would be on the move again. These moves help me to pinpoint when things happened in my life as I can generally associate events with the house we were living in at the time.

The first house was the prefab. I remember the train but I really don’t remember the shed though I feel certain it must have been there.  I wasn’t a knitter yet but I was only three years old when we moved to the next house.

The busiest time in the shed was always in the run-up to Christmas when numerous trains, animals in cages with bars and wheels, dolls’ cribs, wobbly men on pedestals, etc., etc. would appear. There were even doll’s houses with real electric lights and, to my mind, real bricks on the walls. In addition to these there would often be a larger mysterious item whose significance I did not understand until many years later.

Dad was well-known as a man who could make things or repair anything that went wrong. One of his roles every year was to prepare a local community hall for a Christmas party for policemen’s children. By the time I was eight or nine years old I was allowed to go and help in the setting up. I would be put to work decorating the tree or blowing up balloons while Dad got on with putting up lights, arranging tables and such like. One year I was amazed to discover that where there had been a door, when we arrived in the room, had suddenly become a fireplace and I had seen that fireplace before. It was the structure that had been taking shape in the shed. Part of Dad’s role was to ensure that Father Christmas arrived safely at the party.

Dad could, and did, turn his hand to anything mechanical, electrical or creative. For most things he didn’t need a plan or a pattern. He just made something to fit a space or purpose or to make best use of the materials available. I’m still not sure whether it is nature or nurture but I acquired a great deal of Dad’s creative approach and a great deal of his temperament. I also acquired something that was definitely due to heredity – the incurable disease that proved to be a large factor in my life as a knitter.

I believe Dad also sparked the interest in numbers, which led to my love of mathematics. He was not a gambler but had survived ten years in the army, including the war-time period, with a pack of cards always at the ready. There was also a roulette wheel which was kept wrapped in a piece of sacking. This parcel unfolded to show the ‘table’ drawn onto the sacking. I was allowed to look at the wheel but never to play with it. The cards were a different matter. There was nothing as simple as Snap, like most other children played. I learned to play Pontoon and Rummy before I learned to read. To me it seemed completely normal.

My Dad also knew a few card tricks. The one that fascinated me most needed the information that he kept on the back of a photograph (Writing on the back of whatever came to hand seemed to be a regular thing. My birth certificate has a ‘recipe’ for a mixture to remove rust written on the back of it!) The code dictated the order in which the cards should be stacked so that they could be dealt out by spelling their names and turning over the cards.  I never ceased to be impressed as K-I-N-G revealed a king; Q-U-E-E-N showed a queen, and so on. It would be a fairly simple mathematical exercise to establish the sequence but I have never tried to work it out myself. I prefer to retain the air of mystery.

2. STRANDS OF DNA