Knitting

It took over 16,000 stitches to knit the 9 squares that I had mailed off to Knit-a-Square Foundation. After a long flight to South Africa, the 8x8-inch squares will be sorted by material and then pieced together to make blankets for orphaned children, each blanket containing a patchwork of colors and yarns from around the world. Trying out different knitting stitches while finding a good way to use up my yarn scraps from past projects, I liked the idea of contributing a small part of something that will become a cohesive, whole unit, helping to warm children through the winter months.

I took up knitting on a dare because a friend of mine, who started before me, mentioned that learning how to knit from an instructions book was impossible. Being a technical writer by trade, I set out to prove her wrong. It was something I had meant to pick up, anyway, and I figured if I really got stuck, I could ask Tung's grandma for help. Though she's a avid knitter and was eager to teach me the tools of the trade, the only way I could have learned how to knit was on my own. I'm left-handed, and so is she, but ironically, she learned how to knit right-handed because the woman who taught her in Viet Nam had initially refused to do so unless Tung's grandma agreed to pick up right-handed knitting. When the patterns became reversed, coupled with how hard it was to translate Vietnamese terminology into the English instructions I had become acquainted with (knit, purl, knit in back of stitch), it became clear that I was going nowhere fast as her pupil.

So I kept at it with my little left-handers' guide to knitting. Like my other self-taught endeavors--learning how to look at Magic Eye books, rollerskating, and reading Vietnamese--knitting came with a whole new set of frustrations that I trained myself to work through in order to master. Hands tangled in yarn, knitting needles jabbing me every which way, fingers tender from the tension of the needles rubbing up against them, I slowly pieced together my first scarf. Something about falling into the rhythm of a pattern and keeping the hands busy while the mind was free to drift instilled within me a sense of zen. And something about those journeys in life that you start thinking you could get help, but that you end up having to make on your own, gives them a sense of deeper meaning and value. I made many knitting mistakes throughout the years, and though I attempted to fix them, some of them I couldn't quite amend or cover up. So I left them in my work like scars, a testimony of being human, making mistakes, and ultimately learning from them.

At the post office when my package to Knit-a-Square was being weighed, I was asked to declare a value for the parcel, one of the requirements for sending it. "I don't know the value," I had told the postal worker behind the counter, "It's for charity." When she pressed on, I threw out a number to be done with: "Ten dollars." But the value of feeling good about myself for accomplishing a meaningful task at the year end, of using a self-taught hobby to do good, of contributing to an effort to warm orphaned children in South Africa--now, that's priceless.