I was reading this post on Stephanie’s blog about her 24 year old baby blanket and it got me thinking….over the past 9 or 10 years, since my friends started producing children, I must have knit at least 11 baby blankets/shawls (that would be Ceri, Ben, Thomas, Michael, Zoe, Gemma, Luke, Isaac, Sarah & Jacob) with one WIP at the moment - that is the baby AND the blanket are WIPS!!!!.

Most of these were lacey shawls like this one

knit from this pattern, which has been so well-used it is now held together with sellotape! The pattern has two different shawls and on the occasions when a friend has produced a second child I have had to remember which style I knit for the first.

Whilst writing this I realised that I have very few photographs of the recipients with their shawls although I know that all were used as I saw the babies on many occasions with them, I just never thought to take pictures for some reason. I will have to ask the parents to search and see if they can find pictures for me.

Anyway, I’m digressing from the point of this post which was, reading about Stephanie’s 24 year old baby blanket which she still has I wondered how many of my blankets and shawls will still be owned by the recipients in 24 years time. Will they keep them and bring them out for their own babies? Will they remember who it was that knit the shawl for them all those years before?

In most cases I have known the parents for most of my life and hope that in 24 years time I will still be in contact and so will be able to remind them.

I myself have three blankets that were crocheted by my Nan -

she used to turn these out like a factory and give them away to the Salvation Army to be handed out to homeless people on the streets. Her friends from church would give her all their left over balls of wool and she would make these wonderful multi-coloured blankets. Occasionally she was given a whole packet of unwanted yarn and so would knit a solid colour or a solid with a border. Then someone would tell her it was too nice to give away and they would be raffled at church or bought by a friend.

She also made them for us as children and the blue one with the white centre and border used to be on my bed when I was a child.

The blue blanket is single bed sized and the two pink blankets are smaller - about 45″ square and these were knit by her later in life and given to me I hope that when we finally get the adoption approval that I will use these on my childrens beds - my Nan would have approved of that.

I love the idea of items being made by one generation, used by another and then handed on down - the sense of continuity appeals to me. I would love to think that my knitting would still be bringing joy long after I’ve gone.

technorati tags:crochet, shawl, blanket, heirloom

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 at 2:07 pm and is filed under snow, crochet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.