The Finisher: My Journey in Forensic Knitting

Treasured stitches: I have finished some four dozen hats and scarves, along with several sweaters, completing half-done projects and knitting up a vast stash of high quality yarns and fibers.

One day a few months after our mother passed away, my sister and I loaded up my car with a bounty of my mother's uncompleted knitting projects and her abundant stash of luxury fibers.

"It's your inheritance!" my sister joked, though we were both heartbroken.

She is not a knitter—not yet anyway.

I'm the one with the knitting gene, and my Mom always called me "the finisher."

Here is a fraction of my Mom's projects and 

yarn stash—all of which I brought home.

Back home, I unpacked and took a long look at my new UFO's (unfinished objects). The dozens of half-finished and nearly done scarves, hats, and sweaters filling my living room were all gorgeous, all made with quality yarn, and all just a bit overwhelming.

"What on earth was she thinking?" I wondered. Then, "What on earth have you done to me!"

A prodigious knitter who had completed scores of beautiful projects, my mother had also abandoned many more uncompleted projects than I had known—and, possibly, even more than she had realized. I am talking sizable numbers here—some 50 or more projects. Many were stowed deep under beds or hidden high up on closet shelves, where she could no longer reach.

Like it or not, she had bequeathed me with a boatload of projects that at first seemed a burden but later became a blessing as I grappled with her loss. Perhaps it was karmic, I thought. As works best with most things, I tackled both my grieving and my finishing one day at a time.

It helped a lot that my mother's projects were and are worthy of finishing. Understand me when I say that no one inwardly groaned when my mother presented us with her creations—or those from my late grandmother before her.

They were artisans who cared about quality, from choosing fabulous yarns in beautiful colors and enduring, classic patterns to crafting garments that fit and met high standards of elegance, style, and practicality. There was nothing not to love about their bespoke knit creations.

As a third-generation knitter, I always loved those times with my grandmother and mother showing off our latest knitting projects, exclaiming over works-in-progress, praising color and pattern choices, sharing techniques, and fingering luscious wools. Even in summer we didn’t hesitate to try on new works, wrapping our necks in cozy scarves, donning woolen hats, and pulling on thick, cabled turtlenecks in anticipation of winter.

As I grew up my grandmother knitted acres of cabled winter hats, scarves, and mittens—often in fire engine red, cranberry, winter white, and forest and kelly green—along with a multitude of sweaters for three grandchildren, sometimes shipping her latest batch in brown paper-wrapped cartons, with each item carefully wrapped in white tissue paper.

My mother was partial to lacework with intricate patterns worked in soft mohair and luxury fibers, all in sky colors or jewel tones. She whipped up dozens of elegant shawls and scarves, an afghan for every grandchild, and countless prayer shawls and baby blankets for her network of friends and their families. At the end of her demanding work weeks, knitting was a respite. In times of grief it was a solace. In retirement it was a welcome occupation.

During my 30s, as my own knitting skills grew, I favored intarsia, colorwork sweaters and armies of hats to keep my family warm through frigid upstate New York winters. Dark nights kept me experimenting with scrap yarn knitting or undercover, yarn-bombing installations.

"It's wonderful that you always finish what you start," my mother would mention.

But that wasn't always so.

When I was young she sternly directed me to create a large "project box" that could store everything I had started and later abandoned. Still, her comment stayed with me, maybe even influencing me to later become a serial knitter. As with reading books, I finish one project before beginning another.

As I delved into bags and boxes of yarns and projects I was buoyed to discover that her L'Air du Temps fragrance lingered on. Rapturously I stuck my nose eagerly into all, deeply inhaling and feeling the sting of loss and the memory of her comfort at once.

I began with easy projects—those still on their needles and in a readily apparent pattern I recognized. For weeks I simply picked up where she had left off, knitting more inches to make scarves longer, often in a stockinette or single cable. With no real thought required, my steady, rhythmic repetition allowed grief to show up and then ripple out into something calm, and, eventually, gratitude and joy. Having something real and tangible in my hands, with fingers on fibers and needles that she last touched countered unreal loss and absence.

I moved on to more complicated projects that required me to put together pieces of a puzzle, matching projects with printed patterns, and where there were none, analyzing patterns created by her fingers years earlier. As I worked on unfinished hats, sumptuous lacework scarves, and abandoned sweaters, I was cocooned through long winters.

Having something real and tangible in my hands, with fingers on
fibers and needles that she last touched countered her unreal loss and absence.

Through it all ran the strands of memory and meditation, loss and grief, and the nature of obstacles. "Why didn't you finish this one, Mom?" I asked with each project. The usual answers of time and patience did not ring true: she generally had both.

But knitting projects can and do go wrong in a myriad of ways: inattention to the gauge, yarn that doesn't marry well with the selected pattern, difficulties in following instructions, errors caused by distraction, sizes that turn out too large or too small, to name a few.

In some cases, she was so very close to completion it was truly baffling to understand why she dropped the project. In other cases, it was clear she had reached a thorny stage in shaping or piecing, blocking, and sewing garments together as with sweaters.

But whether I diagnosed the cause as inattention and a wandering eye for the next enticing project, giving up on interpreting a gnarly, cryptic pattern instructions, lack of will to unravel and start again, or simply forgetting about the project after it was back-burnered, soon the answers didn't matter to me.

My job was to cast out, look beyond or overcome these obstacles. I was becoming knitting's Ganesha, the Hindu deity revered for removing obstacles!

I couldn't go back and find out why she left one project or another unfinished, any more than I could go back and reduce her suffering. But where she left off, I knew I could follow.

Could I match my gauge and tension to hers? Could I continue a pattern in one unbroken flow? Or would I depart and find another way? At first I aimed for perfection, with no gap or hiccup visible between the work of two knitters across time. But soon I let go of the goal of seamless knitting. This was a relay and the baton had been passed, but it was up to me to carry on in my own way from her foundation, as we all must do after losing our parents.

My sister, my mother, and I took a selfie during our last trip together.

After completing some three dozen scarves, hats, and shawls, I worked on greater challenges: partially knit sweaters. Now when I touch the same stitches she touched, I'm allowing for more creativity and letting go of perfection. Each piece, wholly unique, tells a story of not one, but two knitters.

I still have a number of UFOs to complete and lots of yarn from her stash before I'm done.

And that's okay with me. Because in the end it's a conversation with my mother that I hope I never finish.

Tips for unfinished projects

Assess: Not all projects are worth your time and dedication. Is there something you love about the project or that someone in your life will love? Do you have a meaningful personal connection with the piece?

Let go: Think your garment needs to be perfect? Think again. It's the imperfections and creative adaptations that will give projects life and personality. Make the story visible.

Unravel: It's okay to unravel old stitches. Make way for the new! It's even okay to unravel entire projects and rewind the yarn for projects to come.