OLD & CHERISHED: Vintage Aran Cardigan

Best-quality wool, classic patterns, and quality workmanship make for a sweater that wears like iron. My mom knit me this gorgeous classic when I was in high school in the 1970s, and I've been wearing it ever since. She has always been a prodigious knitter of beautiful garments and accessories.

And it's all the more remarkable because she finished it all the while working full time at Johns Hopkins University during the Vietnam War, the feminist movement, and coeducation at a previously male institution. (But then, maybe that's why she turned to knitting: its calming nature.)

I'm third in our matriarchal line of knitters and started with a Knitting Nancy before moving on to a pair of needles. Between my grandmother's and my mother's projects, yarn and needles were never hard to find. We had deep chests of leftover yarns to root through.

With insomnia running in the family, I suspect there was a lot of middle-of-the-night knitting. My sister and I would wake up, go downstairs, and be amazed by the progress overnight.

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