If you ask Google if knitting is good for you it will tell you that knitting can help lower anxiety, increase self-worth, improve concentration, help with visual/spatial awareness, aid anger management, increase feelings of empowerment, and provide an activity that is self-soothing.
Google describes knitting a lot like taking a walk, which, it says, reduces stress and anxiety, enhances overall mental health, improves your mood, increases awareness, helps you feel connected, enhances self-expression, improves your cognitive function, is beneficial for cardiovascular health, manages weight and improves overall physical well-being.
I’m thinking that knitting interspersed with walking Piper should, as my father would have said, “fix whatever ails you.”
In her book The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times Michelle Obama writes about how knitting helped her get through some of the nasty, early, dark days of COVID, “In all my decades of staying busy, I had always presumed that my head was fully in charge of everything, including telling my hands what to do. …(K)nitting…reversed the flow. It buckled my churning brain into the back seat and allowed my hands to drive the car for a while. It detoured me away from my anxiety, just enough to provide some relief.”
A lot has been written over the past decade or so about the therapeutic value of knitting. Our grandmothers and great grandmothers would hardly believe how their essential work making socks and sweaters and mittens and their peaceful pastime creating doilies, table cloths and tea cozies has become such an obsession.
Previous generations of women had their own anxieties—pre vaccinations, childhood diseases were terrifying. Mothers watched children die from conditions we, for the most part, no longer worry about. The family economy, their own health, for many, their lack of autonomy, and, as they aged, losing a tooth and then another and another was cause enough to be anxious.
Although our grandmothers didn’t write books about the therapeutic characteristics of knitting, the afternoons they spent with their friends drinking tea, discussing life’s challenges and knitting would have been just as healing then, as they are now.
But these days. These bizarre, chaotic, disruptive, insane days of turmoil require knitting on a whole other level. Gentle yarn overs. Rhythmic click, click, clicking. Soft sensuous slide of cashmere. Harmonized, coordinated shades of muted pinks and blues and greens. Polite, mannerly circles of well-behaved women, need to step aside, need to be interrupted for a moment by a metaphorical clash of a cymbal. We need to, as it were, take the mic out of the stand and storm the stage…a bit like Mick or Elvis.
This weekend we had that moment. No gentle knitting. No soft matching yarns. No stitch-by-stitch instructions. No expensive wool.
We used old sheets and duvet covers from the bags of cast-offs in our basement or from the second-hand store. We ripped them up to make our yarn. We pulled off the frayed edges. We combined colours we had never imagined ever using, never mind putting them together with other colours we never imagined ever using. Then we knit these bizarre balls of string? Not quite. Yarn? Not really. Cotton? Not purely. Into bathmats.
Bathmats. That’s it. Women travelled to Saturna Island to rip up sheets to make bathmats. Why? Why not? And then there were all the other reasons for spending a sunny spring weekend on Saturna. Joni’s stories of her Coast Salish grandmothers hard work and knitting innovations. Good food. Whale watching. The peaceful bliss of birdsong, the cacophony of frogs and the stars. On our out-of-the-way island there is little to dim the lights in the night sky. There is no better place to immerse yourself in the wonder of the light show than on the patio, wrapped in a blanket, with a cup of hot tea.
When you come to the Lodge you will have a ripped-sheet, knitted bathmat. You’ll find ripped-sheet, knitted doormats and ripped-sheet knitted bed shawls…everywhere. I might be wearing a ripped-sheet cape. Or, you might eat your breakfast on a ripped-sheet placemat (I haven’t made them yet).
This weekend we ate together and ripped sheets. We talked together and ripped sheets. We listened to each other and ripped sheets. And then we knit. Inside we knit. Outside we knit. Loudly we knit. Quietly we knit. We knit with an edge. Ours weren’t gentle stitches. Ripped-sheet yarn knitting is not elegant. It is not noble. It has attitude. Deliberateness. Determination.
Why did we do it? Not just because it is good for us for all the Google reasons. But because we need to. The simple over and under. The around and through. The ripping. The fraying. The thinking it out. The making it work. The work of making it. It helps us keep our balance.
And when women get together and recalibrate their equilibrium they go home and reestablish balance in their homes and workplaces. And when their homes and workplaces are rebalanced our world has a hope of refinding its balance. I know. I know that going from ripped-sheet bathmats to balance in the world is a stretch. But it’s also a start.
Each one is sufficiently bizarre and beautiful on its own. Together they take crazy to a whole other level.
