Mindfulness is a buzzword that gets thrown around about all sorts of subjects these days, and it is often connected to craft because of the ways that mindfulness, attentiveness and thoughtfulness can combine when making something to turn it into a meditative, contemplative act.
Most of us who’ve been around the knitting world for a while know that knitting is often noted for its stress relieving properties (at least after you get over the frustration of learning the basics), but it can also serve as a means to connect you to the string of knitters throughout history, as well as to yourself and your immediate community.
Rachel Matthews explores these threads and offers essays and exercises for other knitters to try in her book Mindfulness in Knitting.
The book offers reflections on knitting as a lifelong structure for learning, finding our place through yarn, knitting sacred spaces, knitting circles and craftivism and knitting and self-discovery.
“The simple life of mindful knitting co-ordinates our heads, hands and hearts, helping our thinking become wider, deeper, freer and ultimately more interesting and creative,” she writes.
While knitting is often categorized as woman’s work or something grannies do, those of us who make with yarn know “the skill, vision, patience and devotion with which all things, useful or not so useful, are made.”
In addition to stories from her own life and those of other knitters, Matthews calls on knitters to explore their own connections to the craft and other crafters through exercises throughout the book. One example is meditating with yarn and then using leftover yarn to make a mandala that can incorporate different shapes, colors and important numbers.
Mindfulness in Knitting is a meditation on the values that we bring to our knitting and the way that those values can shape us and our knitting projects. For example knitting can become an expression of our thrift, our desire to protect the environment, or a way to connect with like-minded people and express things through yarn that our important to us. And as we shape the knitting, the knitting shapes us as well.
There aren’t any huge revelations about the power of knitting in this book, but there don’t have to be. Read it and see if those revelations come to you all the same.
About the book: 144 pages, hardcover. Published 2023 by Leaping Hare Press, suggested retail price $15.
