I have just stitched (using my first woollen needle) the three pieces of my shawl together. It took me more than a year and a half to knit it. One part of the shawl is the very first piece of serious knitting my son did. It wonderfully records the stretched holes and dropped stitches, forever preserved as a beginning. Another part of the shawl has an anarchic pale blue stripe where my son was determined to rail against my instruction that I wanted the shawl to be black. Again it captures a moment of defiant and rightful overthrow and the effect of the pale blue stripe along the trim is “grip-like” and I love it.

The back part, the big blanket square, is indecisive but a testament to the moods that created it. Chunks of pearl followed by let this be finished, switch to bigger needles to make it be over quicker, and back to neater stitches and let this be done stitches and on and on.

Then the poor shawl had a terrible two months of not being stitched properly and falling apart because I had stitched it poorly with cheap thread that would never hold the wool together and eventually parted. Tonight with a knitting sewing needle I looped the parts up and it fits together like a jigsaw. Perhaps because all the misshapen bits have had a bit of time to be acquainted!

It’s physically cosy in a way that no other blanket is. Maybe the labour of small fingers is what delivers that cosyness. Or maybe the gesture that I am wrapped up inside something we laboured on together. I hope I’ll be an old woman inside this shawl.