I learned how to knit recently.
I’d been wanting to learn for a couple of years. I don’t know why. It could have been Sarah Bessey’s “Knit One, Purl Joy” piece or it could have been the knitting of all the cozy things I see on Instagram or it could be that I’m restless and like to multi-task and here is something I could do while watching TV or listening to a podcast.
Whatever it was, I wanted to learn.
When we found a new church last year, I knew there was a knitting group almost from the start. There were a few women I saw carrying around their bags full of yarn and knitting projects. I saw the “Stitching for Peace” group on the calendar a couple of times a month.
Nancy was the one who found out I wanted to learn. I’d seen her on the other side of church, needles moving as she sat and listened to the sermon.
“I’ll teach you!” she said. “You don’t need anything. I have needles and yarn. The next time the choir sings just come find me. I’ve taught lots of people how to knit.”
She saw me a couple of Sundays later as we arrived at church, in a flurry of coats and bags and too many children. The way we always arrive at church. She was in her choir robe.
“Ready to knit?” she asked, conspiratorially.
We sat on the couches as she pulled out a ball of purple yarn and some bamboo needles. “I like the bamboo because it’s soft,” she told me. She told me more things, things I tried to file away in my brain, but it was the bamboo tip that stuck.
She cast on and then showed me the basic knit stitch. My hands were clumsy.
“Do I go under or over?” I kept asking about the yarn. Every way I stuck my needle in felt like the wrong way— or maybe the right way?— since I had no idea what I was doing.
“No,” she would tell me patiently, as I stuck my needle in the stitch the wrong way again, “That’s the purl stitch, I’ll teach you that later. This way for the knit stitch.”
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When we got home that day, I picked up the needles and the scant couple of rows I’d fumbled through while we sat together at church. My mind drew a blank. I couldn’t remember what to do. I Googled “knit stitch” and watched a video, kept pausing and re-starting to refresh my fingers and my memory.
I got going for a little bit. Then somehow I slipped half the project off the needles, which had me scrambling to YouTube again to search for “how to cast on knitting” videos.
I properly casted on 20 stitches for my scarf only to realize that, several rows in, they’d somehow multiplied to 28. I unraveled it all and searched for that “how to cast on knitting” video again.
I started and I stopped and I started and I stopped and I began to despair of ever getting anywhere beyond six to eight rows of stitches. People had been doing this for hundreds of years but I was never, ever, ever going to get the hang of it. I despaired of the detailed patterns and projects I’d seen online, grieved even the simplest of projects. I couldn’t get this simple scarf to be long enough for one of my old Beanie Babies, much less for Brooklyn, who’d claimed this project as her own and asked after the status of her scarf on a daily basis, perched on the edge of the couch next to me.
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I realized this was the first new skill I’d learned in I don’t know how long. When’s the last time I learned how to do something for the very first time that was absolutely and completely new to me?
Baking bread? Kind of, but that built on the knowledge of baking I already had.
Yoga? Maybe. But that just seemed to build off my dance background.
I don’t know. Is it accurate to say this is the first time I’ve picked up something completely new since I was a kid? And if so, isn’t that kind of...sad?
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I finished Brooklyn’s scarf. I made it past eight rows of stitches and then I made it past twenty and then it really seemed to come together. And by “really come together” I mean still little by little. I sat in the evening while we caught up with This is Us or gloried to another season of Ugly Delicious, but I no longer had to rip it all apart and start over. You can see the progression; there’s a hole or two toward the beginning, it’s sort of knobbly and lumpy. Then, you can see it: the stitches even out as you go along.
I’ve started another scarf, for Caden, because if Brooklyn got one he wanted one, too. Now it’s his turn to sit perched next to me. “When will my scarf be done?” he asks. He drags over my knitting bag, usually at inopportune times, and sets it next to me, a wordless nudge to keep working. I’ve tried to tell him that it will be probably 70-degrees and far too warm to wear a scarf before I finish, but he doesn’t care.
Still, despite the rising temperatures, knitting has turned out to be the most appropriate ritual right now.
I thought it would be nice to have something to do while watching TV or reading books to the kids on the couch—look how productive I am!—and it is. But it turns out it’s saving my sanity.
It’s not only giving me something to do while we flip on The Good Place each night, it gives my hands something to do while I listen to our governor give his near-daily press conferences in the afternoon. Every time I tune in I grab my knitting, instinctively, to steady my hands. Tyson and I sit to talk—more often than ever these days—and out comes my knitting, focusing my hands and my attention. I need it, that tactile motion and movement in my hands or I feel as though I could fly apart altogether.
It grounds me when I sit on the couch while the kids watch a movie or laugh uproariously at the antics of Booba. I listen to a podcast: “The Daily” if I want to stay informed, “Pantsuit Politics” if I need therapy. Sometimes my hands shake and I grasp the needles tighter. Sometimes I slip a stitch and I go back now, because I’ve figured out what it’s supposed to look like, what it’s supposed to feel like, and I fix it, without having to unravel it all and begin again.
This post was written as part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to read the next post in this series "All Things New".