Knitting Lessons

Recently I started teaching a dear friend of mine to knit. I've been a part of several other friends' learning experiences in the past, but it feels different this time. Partly because I've been able to spend more time with this friend and because I'm helping her build her skills from the ground up. She is doing exceptionally well and is fast developing a deep love for the craft. When I'm talking to her about knitting, I try to remember what it felt like to be a new knitter, and I try to tell her things I wish someone would have told me when I was just getting started. There are technical lessons and tips and tricks I've picked up along the way. But then there is the deeper part of knitting that I believe differentiates those who knit from the knitters in life. Many times I wonder about how to teach the more existential part of knitting to my friend and to anyone else I might teach to knit in the future. How do you teach someone passion? How do you show a new knitter to look to their craft for comfort? Or help them understand how the deepest love can be expressed in their stitches? In contemplating this, I began to reminisce on my own journey as a knitter.

In 2002, I was 24 years old and suddenly found myself in a very unexpected, intense personal crisis. I was tiring of my job environment, I was in a relationship that was on the rocks (to say the least), and all I could think about was how badly I wanted to have a baby. I realized that I was the same age my mother was when I (her only child) was born and I couldn't be farther from the point in my life where I would be able to have a child myself. I sank into a depression that led me to start crocheting baby blankets for my "hope chest." My mother had taught me only the most basic crochet when I was a little girl, and I used those remedial skills to start churning out blanket after blanket after blanket to soothe my troubled soul. In August 2003, I took a position as a travel nurse in California, hoping that a dramatic change in my surroundings would help me get my bearings back. Unfortunately, the move had the opposite effect. I felt so isolated in my life, in my relationship, and now at work. I was ready to settle down and start a family, but nothing in my life was congruent with what I felt inside. But I was still crocheting those baby blankets.

One day I found myself ready for a more challenging project, so I went to the nearest big box craft store and started perusing the shelves for ideas. I remember being so amazed that there were entire magazines devoted to knitting and crochet. I thought for sure that I was the only twenty-something in the world sitting at home with yarn and an unsatisfiable urge to make! While crochet was a comfort for me, I loved the characteristics of the knit fabric I saw in the project photos in the craft store magazines, so it didn't take me long to resolve to learn to knit. I bought a "Learn to Knit" book and began the process of teaching myself. I had a few false starts on some projects I ended up abandoning, but I arrived back home in November with my first garment, a blue baby sweater, on the needles. And I finished it!

My friends were happy to have me home but were quick to nickname me "granny" when they realized that my purse always had a knitting project in it. I think I may have embarrassed them a bit when I knitted at restaurants or while waiting at the nail salon. They all wondered how I'd gone to California relatively normal and came back as a knitter. But I was starving for knowledge about knitting! There didn't seem to be a tremendous amount of resources available to me at the time, and the rare yarn shop that I came across left me feeling a bit like an outside invader. So I decided I'd have to gather the information for myself. For a while, I bought every book on knitting I could get my hands on. I read and read and knit and knit.

In June 2004, I met the love of my life, and almost immediately, we started making plans for our future together. In an instant, there was a person who both loved me AND shared all my dreams for a family. It was then that my knitting took on a whole new purpose. My knitting became, and still is, my love expressed with my time, my hands, my thoughts, and my intent. It was and is a physical manifestation of my faith that God will give us all our hearts' desire and all that He has promised us. My knitting is the very proof of our hopes and dreams.

Today my knitting remains to be so much more than the simple, rhythmic movement of my hands. It is my way to cope, to show love, to provide for my family. My knitting is my prayers in stitches.

So, when I teach knitting to others, how do I show how it saved me? How it has spoken for me in ways I couldn't have done on my own? How it has helped me cope and survive, focus and wait? Maybe that is not for me to try to teach. Perhaps that can only be learned from the knitting.