Where’d this come from?

One of the amazing things about going off on a trip is how everything seems different when you get home. Wasn’t the counter an inch higher than that in that bathroom? Was the kitchen really quite that size? You see old things with new eyes. Hence, major housecleaning has ensued, stuff I hadn’t had the energy nor the breath to tackle for so long and now I both do and want to. And so:

I found a UFO so old I struggled to find any memory of knitting it. Now, I have wanted, ever since I was ten years old and watching my mother knitting my older sister and then my dad a complicated Aran pattern, to knit me one of them thar things. I knit Lynda one, a friend who later died of postpolio syndrome, who’d never had a sweater that fit her odd-sized body in her life; that, at least, I could do for her, and did. I made one for my husband, as close as I could remember to what my mom had made. Same yarn. Basically the same pattern. He was twenty-four inches taller than Lynda, and I always wanted to get a picture of the two of them side-by-side in their matching sweaters, saying, And this is why we do gauge swatches!

And apparently I started to make a matching one for me. I didn’t remember it. I didn’t know why I’d stopped. Probably for Lynda’s sake–she probably asked for a warm sweater when I had already started mine, and after I finished hers I probably didn’t want to look at that yarn again for awhile.  By that point I’d knitted a lot of it. And then I so much didn’t remember mine that I actually eventually gave most of the yarn away to my mom, not realizing what that meant, who later gave it away to a neighbor when she and Dad downsized and sold the house.

But look what I found. The back, and another bag of yarn. Seven balls, 63 yards each. Huh. Enough there to finish it into a vest, definitely, and at least one sleeve, although it’s definitely an outdoor-weight sweater. Not two, though, even if I have short arms. It’s not exactly how I’d design it if I were starting from the beginning now, but it is what it is and I quite like it.

I’ll get right to it, as soon as I finish my present project, my sister’s Christmas present, the one for… Oh. Right. And that must be why it never got finished.