Mothers and daughters and knitting While sitting outside at lunch today, I worked on the sweater I’m making for my mother’s Christmas present and I thought about the three or four other sweaters I’ve made her over the last few decades. →[More:]She usually isn’t entirely pleased with them. She’ll say the sweater is beautiful but it isn’t quite the right shade for her or the shape isn’t that flattering to her figure, and she hasn’t gotten that much wear out of them.

This time I’m making her a cream merino wool cardigan with a bobble grapevine pattern down the front and crocheted edges. You can see an unfinished sweater from this pattern, knitted in green, here (the only public access picture I could find, sorry). I hope I’ve gotten it right, and as I work often vow to myself that if Mum doesn’t *really* like this one, it’ll be the last sweater I make for her.

But today I was thinking that at least she isn’t like my former co-worker Babs’s mother. Babs once told me that she knitted her mother a sweater and mailed it to her home in Vancouver as a gift. Babs’s mother apparently didn’t like the sweater, so she took it all apart, used the yarn to knit another sweater... and when she finished it, she sent it back to Babs.

Granted… Babs couldn’t knit well, and she did not have good taste. The few things I’ve seen that she had made looked like crap because they were so poorly made and the colour/yarn choices simply did not work. But it’s etiquette 101 that you just don’t do things like that to anyone (and I don't care if it was someone you pushed out your vagina), because it’s rude and hurtful.

Ah, mothers, and the way they never do get over thinking they know best.