3KCBWDAY3 — My Knitting Hero

Heroes are not easy for me. Somewhere around 1995, VH1 told me that Jimmy Page had done terrible things to a groupie with a shark, and a hole was punched through the paper wall of my blind adoration. I've never believed in God, so my faith acts more like a sonic shriek, bouncing back from trees and mountains and bare skin to form a landscape of happiness in my psyche. Knitting feeds my radar; the act of using sticks and string to make fabric is absurd and fantastic. It brings you into the present and allows you to drift there, still free enough to look up and connect with other people. I tuck balls under my elbow and knit socks while standing and talking - whereas if people interrupt me while illustrating, I will use my elbows to try to break their faces.

I took up knitting to stop myself from prodding my heartbreak while trying to reconcile with the ex-husband. I was facing the rest of my life without the person I had thought I loved, as well as the person I still loved but couldn't reach, and the only way I could think to keep walking on that path was to look at my feet and focus on the place I was instead of the place I wasn't. So with a trip to the craft store and a stack of library books, I sat obstinately ignoring the 4th of July explosions outside, staring at the diagrams in Stitch 'n Bitch and painstakingly casting on little rows of twisted knots to somehow wrestle from one needle to the other. After an hour or two of struggling, some dormant ancestor got tired of watching me and turned on an ancient brain connection. It was like seeing sounds.

There are many knitters I admire. Funny, vulgar, sexy, wise, and scary knitters. But the more I read history and collect old books about lost gansey traditions of the British Isles, the more I want to travel, dig through regional archives, visit museums, and walk the standing stones of my ancestors to find out who they were before they were me.

My heroes are the ones in our blood that walk us down the path.

 Knitting a Fisher's Life Story

1949 Scottish "gutter quines"

A ball of yarn: 1918

Soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington, D.C.

 

Knitter 1879, William Adolphe Bouguereau

 

Buxtehude Madonna, Master Bertram of Minden, 

Germany, late 1300s