Finishing date: June 2010.
When I was young, my grandmothers took turns teaching me how to work with yarn. In the summer of 2005, grandma Lilian suddenly died. I was seventeen. And in early autumn 2006, grandma Anna-Liisa was diagnosed with cancer. She died in the house where she had raised her seven children in early 2007.
Being avid knitters, both of them, they left bags and bags of yarn. As the grandchild with the keenest interest in handicrafts, the bags were given to me. Most of the yarn, though, was odd skeins of different colors, thicknesses and fibres. Not enough of anything specific to make larger pieces of, or just too much acrylic for me to use for anything that would be worn. I was at a loss as to what to make of it all.
A couple of years passed. I had the most hilarious history of religion teacher in high school (a real original, he combined teaching about religions with also being a biology teacher). He told us about the Hindu tradition of making mandalas in colored sand. Spending hours on creating these huge, circular pieces of art on the floor – and then, once finished, sweeping it up. A religious practice for reminding us that everything in life is fleeting and that we should enjoy the process of making rather than whatever we end up accumulating. Because nothing lasts.
This idea intrigued me, so I started knitting a mandala scarf with the odd skeins of wool from my grandmothers’ stash. Meters on end of colorful wool. And then, one dark winter night, unravel it all. A practice of not getting overly attached.
Making the mandala scarf didn’t solve my problem with the bags of yarn, though. Unraveling it meant I still had just as much of it left, lying in boxes under my bed. A couple more years passed. I was reminded of a technique grandma Lilian used quite often: the crocheting of patchwork quilts. One kind is called a grandma’s patch (‘mormorsruta’ in Swedish). Since it’s made in a way to easily combine different colors, it would be perfect for all my odd skeins of yarn. Lilian never taught me this specific technique, but it was easy enough to find instructions online.
And so started a six month period of making patches. That’s what I did during my first two semesters of geography studies at uni, reading text books about geomorphology, soil science, globalization and urban planning, and crocheting grandma’s patches using the odd skeins of yarn inherited from my grandmothers. The weirder the color combinations, the better. Once I had a large enough number of patches, I started organizing them across my bedroom floor, moving them around over the course of a couple of weeks, until I was happy with the balance of seeming randomness and the emerging color gradient. Then it was just a question of crocheting and sowing them together using black yarn.
So, there you have it. The story of the yarn I inherited from both of my grandmothers. The patchwork quilt, made from grandma’s patches, that is my inheritance. I finished it in the summer of 2010. I use it as my bed cover ever since.
Katja Malmborg 