Arts

Hilda Isaacson, a former preschool and elementary school teacher from New Jersey, lost her sight in one eye some years ago, due to a detached retina. So she moved to San Francisco to be closer to one of her daughters, just in case of an emergency.

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Then she took up knitting -- as a way of staying closer to her six  grandchildren back east.

“The other eye completely took over,” she said, shrugging, as she expertly works the needles.

She made a scarf for one grandson in the colors (blue and yellow) of the college he was about to enter. She took a sock-making class at a local arts at a local art school, with fellow Gentle Arts Club member Rodica Feldman.

“She made one sock and I made the other,” Hilda said.   Afterward she decided to make a pair of socks for each of of her grown grandchildren, plus three pairs for grand-spouses, so nine pairs in all.

Whoever has gotten them so far, she said, has been thrilled with them, she said. They’re meant to be house socks, which is a thing in cold climates. She uses a kind of yarn that can be thrown in the washing machine.

“People their age don’t want to be bothered with washing by hand,” she says knowingly.

But when her first great grandchild was going to be born, she started making baby sweaters and blankets. Which as it turned out, has kept a woman who stays pretty busy, even busier.

She swims at the JCCSF and is also taking a writing workshop. A “lifelong learner,” as teachers like to call such people, Hilda enrolls in up to four general interest classes every semester, at the Fromm Institute and  City College of San Francisco.

“I knit in class,” she says.

Hilda is currently working on a tiny sweater for her great grandson Shlomo, now almost a year old.

“I knitted pink sweaters for his two older sisters, and I’m afraid that  if I don’t knit him a blue sweater, he’s going to be wearing the hand-me-downs,” she says tenderly.

Not that that would matter to anyone but her, we think.

 

Read more tales from the Gentle Arts Club, at https://3200stories.org/blog/post/knitted-together-2 , https://3200stories.org/blog/post/knitted-together-3 , and https://3200stories.org/blog/post/knitted-together-1