Good Yarns

... from a recovering knitting addict who still loves good yarns

Photo taken by Jessica Baxter Kelly

In the photo above, I’m at a private retreat with my mother, sister, sister-in-law, and niece/goddaughter. It’s 2012 or 2013, and I’m teaching everyone, but especially my mother, in the relatively early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, to knit. Mom does actually pick up the knit stitch - but she isn’t able to complete an entire dishcloth. I don’t know if my goddaughter is knitting. My sister-in-law already knows how to knit, and my sister finishes a yellow scarf, but states that she will not knit again because she’s afraid she’ll become obsessed.

At the time I thought this was silly - who would stop doing something because she was afraid of liking that something too much?

From a distance of ten years, though, I can see that I was obsessed. Emotions blunted by antidepressants, I knitted and listened to audiobooks to the exclusion of just about everything else. (For those who are interested, my favorites were the books in Phil Rickman’s Merrily Watkins series. I still listen to them.) Every gift I gave was a knitted item: socks, hats, Christmas stockings, scarves, fingerless mitts, afghans, dishcloths, and shawls. I’m embarrassed when I look back on those years. Once I gained some perspective, I told everyone that they didn’t have to worry about keeping the stuff I’d made.

Purple Shawl

The winds of knitting are capricious. Although I knitted so many items for others, and I’m sure most of those items are long gone, a shawl that I knitted for myself found its greatest purpose for a loved one. When my father neared the end of his life he was always cold, no matter how many blankets we piled on, and I remembered a purple shawl I had knitted for myself a few years ago, of a warm, lofty wool/acrylic blend, might help him stay warm. I hadn’t thought of that shawl in years. I asked Dad if he wanted it and he said with longing: oh yes. Please.

Within an hour I had retrieved the shawl from home. As I draped it over him lengthwise, covering his entire body from his feet to his chin, he sighed: Thank you. There’s nothing like a hand knitted shawl. (Dad had not, to my knowledge, ever worn a shawl, handmade or otherwise.) The shawl was with him as he died a few days later, and it covers him now as he lies at rest. Others wondered at that, but I knew it was time for me to release the shawl; it had served its true purpose.

Fast-forward five years:

I am knitting a very complex shawl with vivid colors while at my sister’s house, just because the pattern and yarn has caught my fancy. This shawl is stunning, forming an asymmetrical triangle with varying stitch patterns. (The pattern is called Untucked and can be found on Ravelry, for those who are interested.) My future niece’s mother Ann is fascinated by the pattern and process of my knitting. Fueled by wine, she and I connect on a deep level: a lesbian who came out in her fifties and who has yet to be wholly embraced by her own mother, Ann is moved by my - our - unqualified acceptance of my son’s orientation. We connect further while sitting together around a summer campfire in my sister’s back yard.

I didn’t see Ann again after that - still haven’t, in fact - because she lives across the country, but after finishing the shawl I realized that this shawl belonged to Ann, and away it went, from Michigan to Washington.

And here’s where the universe shows up: my niece, Ann’s daughter, recently told me that Ann received something else at the same time as the shawl: a breast cancer diagnosis.

Ann wore that shawl to every treatment.

Knitting - or any craft, really - can be a kind of manifesting, and this goes beyond the practice of knitting a batch of hats or mittens for charity - which is important work, of course.

Manifesting a specific physical item that will fulfill a specific need of a specific person, when that need has yet to exist - that’s magic. We who practice the craft, if we listen, learn that we will hear the call to create, followed by the call to deliver - even if that call comes years later. We may not know why we’re knitting, and we may not know why someone needs the finished item, but we follow the call.

Yes, those earlier years of obsessive knitting produced an avalanche of knitted items, and gave every indication of some kind of mental illness - but maybe what looked like obsession was actually me getting those first calls to manifest. After all, one of those items was Dad’s purple shawl.

My own fuzzy photo of Dad’s purple shawl

I no longer need the antidepressants, and these days I knit washcloths and afghans, especially for my son who requests a new afghan every few years. The photo below is his most recent afghan; it’s a representation of the sun setting over the Pacific as my son drove my husband and me along the Pacific Coast Highway from Santa Barbara to LA. I adapted a pattern called Massive Attack, which can be found on Ravelry.

PCH afghan - Bella approves.

Ann is still doing well, by the way, and if I feel the impulse to knit something else entirely, I’ll do it. That’s the call to manifest - to create something where once there was nothing.

Huh - kind of like writing.