My mother thinks I'm weird. She says that normal kids my age aren't interested in knitting. I'd argue to the differ. I say knitting is a wonderful, useful and therapeutic hobby. My best friend Sarah loves to knit. It's a talent of hers that I've always admired. There's something exciting about sitting down with a ball of yarn and some needles and winding up with something useful like a bag or sweater. So one day at school I had her teach me. We sat in my office in guidance, and she very patiently showed me the basic knit stitch. It took me a while, but I finally got it. Then she said that I had to learn how to do something called purl. While I couldn't quite understand why, I trusted her and went with it. Purling was harder, but once I'd gotten the hang of that, there was no stopping me! I started knitting a three-inch wide piece of fabric, and just kept incorporating more and more yarn as I ran out of it. There were various colors and textures of yarn, and eventually she brought me a whole skein of light blue yarn. I used that next in my creation. I was so excited about my project that I started carrying it with me to class. Sometimes I would even knit in class!! Classmates started getting curious. They all knew me to be a little weird, and here I was carrying around sharp pointy metal things for no apparent reason…. I also seemed to be trailing a lot of yarn… So they asked. And gradually they all came to know my mission - to learn how to knit. It turns out that there are several other girls in my class who know how to knit, and can do so rather well. I found myself receiving innumerable bits of valuable advice on how to improve my technique. As I continued on my piece of knitting people would compliment me on it and ask what I was knitting. My answer? "Nothing, I'm just knitting." I found in knitting an activity that I could do just for the sake of doing it. I didn't need any specific goal; for me it was enough to just be able to knit and knit. Eventually I used up that entire skein of yarn. By then my creation was long enough to reach from the floor to the ceiling and most of the way back again! People were impressed. But they wondered….could I actually create anything with my knitting?? As amusing as it was, my first creation was hardly functional. I decided to do something about that. So I got myself some not particularly beautiful brown yarn, and began to knit something a little bigger. I figured it would be a scarf. I was wrong. My creation took on a life of its own. I made a mistake counting rows, and accidentally put a kink in the fabric. When I fixed my "accident" a few rows later, I noticed that the fabric now folded back nicely on itself. Hmm, I thought. That looks just about the right size to be a handbag… So I lugged my needles along on our family vacation to Florida that year, praised God that security didn't stop me for carrying a concealed weapon onto the plane, and finished knitting myself a bag on that trip. My little sister and I figured out how wide the strap should be, and I knitted that too. I put it all together the night before school resumed, and wore my bag to school the next day. I got tons of compliments on it (this was right about when knit bags were very fashionable) and many people couldn't believe that I had made it myself!

Knitting helps me in many ways. It gives me a sense of accomplishment. It also is very theraputic. People I've spoken to have all agreed with me that knitting is definitely something which can be calming. There's something soothing about getting into a rhythm and just letting the needles almost go on their own. It's wonderfully freeing. Also, if I am stressed about something, I know I can just sit down, pick up my needles and relax for a little while by focusing just on the knitting. While my angry knitting may be a bit tighter than my ordinary slightly looser knitting, it is helpful all the same.

This hobby reflects the everyday side of me. I am generally considered to be a quiet, introverted person. However, I am also known to be very quirky. I mean, for God's sake, I don't even wear shoes! In both of these senses knitting fits right in with my personality. It is a quiet, individual activity, though it is one that can be shared in a close, meaningful way. Knitting is a bonding activity between people. It is also a link, something I have in common with more people than even I would have imagined. Knitting is something which many people associate with a favorite grandmother, aunt or other important figure in their lives. By knitting around them I often help them connect with those memories. Also, my creations tend to be imperfect, as do I.

There is certainly a life philosophy that I think knitting embraces. When you knit you start out with a ball of yarn. It seems like nothing beautiful could ever come out of the tangled mess of string. Then you start to create. It is a long process, one that takes the repetition of a select few motions again and again. You must be careful to not neglect any of the parts of the whole, because dropping just one stitch will leave a hole in the finished product. Your life gets somehow worked into everything you knit. There are tight sections from when you are excited or stressed, and loose sections done perhaps just before bed. A particularly uneven section might have even been done on a bus ride to school. In a way, this knitting is like our life. We weave our identities bit by bit. We cannot just take the ball of yarn that is our life and toss it on the needles and expect a finished product right away. We must take life one day at a time, tiny step by tiny step. If we attempt to skip even one of those steps, we are incomplete. There is a hole in the fabric of our experience, and that hole will be the weakness by which we will unravel. If we can keep our lives in the same simple order that is seen in knitting, we can create something beautiful just by making simple variations on these patterns. The key is to link the past steps with the present ones in order to be complete. Those past links, those sections, whether they be the stressed tight parts or the loose sleepy bits, are all part of your life, and you must find a way to incorporate these all into the person you are. If you can do all of this, you can become a whole beautiful creation - something to be proud of.