As the Salish Sea Yarn Co. transitions from its current space over to the Farmers’ Market and online sales, the weekly Knit Night group will migrate to the library on Tuesdays from 6-8 PM. Inspired to write about this knitting community, Lori Maxfield put into words the deeper things of knitting…
Why do I knit? I started knitting when I was about 8 years old because my mom was a knitter like her aunt before her. Back in the day, I was never too thrilled about the itchy materials or dowdy designs and gave it up in my teens for other hobbies. When I wandered into the knit shop this fall mostly looking for a cup of tea, I was enchanted by the colors and textures of so many types of fibers – local sheep wool, soft angora, sturdy merino. A flyer invited newcomers to the Wednesday night knit along to make a hat together within a month. Another random person I had never met before was also looking at the flyer – we both agreed, I’ll do it if you do – and that was how it all began.
Six months later, I’m hooked. I heard somewhere that repetitive left-right motions like knitting, drumming, or running can rewire our brains to crave these positive addictions, almost the inverse of how screens can lure us in. And it’s true – in the first few days, my fingers just wanted to keep knitting ‘one more row’ right before bedtime until I started dream-knitting. But it also helps reset my mind and spirit at the end of the day, putting aside electronics so my thoughts can drift, sifting through the residual scraps of the day, mulling and twisting each moment over – a mindful meditation, knit one, purl one, inhale, exhale, repeat.
Other knitters I’ve met share this sense that knitting can be oh so much more than a craft or hobby. It’s a time-honored tradition since the earliest humans looked at a creature and thought ‘I wonder what would happen if I shave this critter, twist that gnarly pile of castaway fluff into a semblance of string, and then form thread by thread, stitch by stitch, into rows and rounds, sweaters and socks.’ The possibilities are endless – the same strand of string could become a sweater or a pot mit – we all have a function to fulfill no matter how we’re formed. It’s a reminder how we are all interconnected – every stitch matters, sometimes thousands of individual stitches all pull together, and if a single one dropped, if a single thread was broken, every other one would feel the hole unraveling the whole. We need each other.
Michelle Obama too joined the ranks of pandemic knitters, self-taught from YouTube – and she noted that knitting teaches you resilience. It’s a given that you will fail along the way – not just in the early learning days, but in nearly every project, you will encounter dropped stitches or misguided tension, and you’ll have to learn how to cope – what to do when you don’t know what to do. Sure, I’ve turned to YouTube to restore more than one late-night stitch tragedy, learning how to ‘tink’ (that’s knit backwards). But also the Tuesday night knitters form an emotional support group when you realize (again) that you need to ‘ribbit’ out a full project and start over (for which chortling ‘ribbit’ like a frog amongst an empathetic chorus helps ease the sting of despair).
The knitters have taught me about life on Orcas. Each week gathers a different set of people as varied as this island itself – experienced and novice, old and young, women and men, locals and new friends we haven’t met yet. We share threads of the latest events, comings and goings, hopes and fears for our country, our world, our tiny island, our unlimited possibilities bound only by our imagination of what we may create.
Thank you for your beautifully written thoughts, Lori, and for allowing me to put them here.
Here are some photos of the final Knit Night on North Beach Road:
May your Saturday Farmers’ Market and online business (click here!) be abundant, Katie!!
