Stitches in time

Andrew Mathieson
BRUSHING her hair each morning is an ordeal for Rosa Brame as she struggles to lift her left hand above her head.
The left side of her body has been shaking uncontrollably and her speech has slowed since the devoted grandmother of three was diagnosed six years ago with Parkinson’s disease.
For the serial knitter, it was more of a nuisance than a hindrance.
Attempting to knit on, she stops and points down her arm toward two aching joints.
“The Parkinson’s controls you rather than you control it,” Rosa explains.
To make matters worse, last year Rosa contracted pneumonia, collapsed in her Newcomb home and spent nine weeks dazed in hospital.
Doctors feared her motor skills would suffer further.
“Keep yourself busy,” a specialist whispered to Rosa.
“You don’t know how busy I am,” she replied under her breath.
Rosa’s dedication to knitting now numbers in the tens of thousands of every possible woollen garment, maybe more.
Last year alone the volunteer overcame illness to stitch together more than 500 pairs of baby lambs-wool slippers for charity at a rate of just an hour and a half each.
Bonnets, booties, beanies and blankets are also always on the agenda.
In a moment of good humour, Rosa slowly places one of the newborn’s beanies on her head.
So tiny, the beanie resembles a shrunken Jewish yarmulke cap.
Rosa found her knitting cause when a Guardian Angels group established in Geelong in 2001.
Her vast range of knitwear has provided warmth for impoverished small children in third-world countries from Mongolia to South Africa.
“When it started, this was like a gift from heaven,” she poignantly notes.
“You knitted what you liked doing, not necessarily things suitable for anybody else you knew.”
Organisers say Rosa brings in many more bags of knitwear than anyone else.
They ask for the donations to arrive at the end of winter but the woollies from Rosa pile up so much that she has to drop them off each week to keep up.
Her lounge and dining rooms resemble the inside of a cramped sweatshop.
The “mess”, as she calls it, from shopping bags of wool yarns and many half-finished projects is immaterial to Rosa.
“I’m always on the lookout for more wool,” she says, “and I would always buy three or four balls of wool each time.
“Fancy a woman over 70 like me still buying another knitting book.”
Generations of Rosa’s family have been surrounded by wool and immersed in knitting.
Still, she bemoans that knitting is a dying craft.
“I’ve got a home economics teacher for a daughter, Rosa declares, “but they’ve put her onto food because the kids aren’t interested in knitting.”
Her grandmother put six-year-old Rosa on the path to circular and flat-knitting, even purl stitching.
It started on scarves then anything to keep warm during wartime Australia.
“I use to get pocket money but I didn’t get lollies – I bought a ball of wool,” she remembers.
Rosa once knitted a jumper emblazoned with a piano pattern down one side. It was never finished for son Phillip but decades later the keen musical director can laugh about the fashion statement.
Now Arthur, Rosa’s husband, bears the brunt – his wardrobe is full of cardigans for nearly every day of winter.
The stockpile makes the thought of having a sheep in their suburban backyard more than half-baked.
Arthur mulls over the proposition momentarily before chuckling,
“I’d have to shear the bugger so much it would have no wool,” Arthur says.
“Actually, he’d be dead.”