MADAM DEFARGE - KNITTING, KNITTING.....

When I have spare time, I like to knit. I learned how to knit back in the early 1950s when the fad for hand-knit argyle socks came back. Most of the girls I ran around with knit argyles like mad; most of us had boyfriends that we gave them too. About the same time it became very fashionable to use angora yarn. We used it to knit a "fake" cuff to wear over our bobbie-socks, and also we used it as one if the yarns in the argyle sock pattern. While we didn't have competitions to see who could use the most argyle in the pattern, I have to admit that the ones I knit for FiFi (my boyfriend at the time whose last name was Fifield) made his ankles look like they belonged on an elephant.

The angora was very long-haired, quite different than the angora I see in the market today. At any rate, I would have won the contest. Fifi, like a good boyfriend, said he liked them -- and as proof of the pudding, so to speak, he wore them a lot. We took our yarn and our knitting to school and at lunch time you could see clumps of girls sitting on the grass knitting away. It seemed like everyone was doing it!

Since then my knitting has pretty much been limited to ski hats, mittens and afghans. But a year or so ago I found a nice website dedicated to knitting and occasionally they offer free patterns. The one below caught my eye; I'm sure I was struck as much by the beauty of the model as the style of the "beanie."

I couldn't see myself wearing one of these things, but I did want to see how they made up. The first one went quickly and I was delighted. After I finished it I thought if I made a second similar one, I could give them to my darling little granddaughters. I knit a second smaller one, and then made a trip to our local Michaels to see what I could find to decorate the hats for two little girls.

I chose some pretty bluish-purplish buttons for Olivia's hat, and some little brownish animal buttons for Justine's. I put a little bunch of flowers on the side of Olivia's, and three angora puff-balls on the side of Justine's. As the first one I made was really for an adult, it turned out to be a little big for Olivia but that didn't matter to her. The girls were delighted and wore them every day for about four months, their mom said. The day that I gave them to the girls I was lucky enough to grab a cute photo of them at a nearby park where we went for lunch.

If you are interested in having this pattern or perusing the website, here's where you will find it:http://www.knittingdaily.com/blogs/patterns/archive/2008/01/01/cecily-beanie.aspx