The Big Shrug

The glide of my hands
In my knitting I am free
It is my ocean
–Knit One, Haiku Too

I missed my morning walks on the beach this week, as work had me otherwise occupied. My week was further truncated, as I prepared for another trip out of town. So at times like these, it is my knitting that substitutes for my meditative time with God and myself.

In the last stages of my marriage, when the abuse was at its height and I was frantically making plans for ending the madness, it was my knitting that shielded me and helped me escape. Literally. For weeks I hid my divorce and restraining order paperwork in my knitting bag, underneath my Big Shrug (in progress) and several ostrich eggs of wool.

The Big Shrug began like most knitting projects — I heard about it from some knitters on the KnitList and after some late night online yarn shop crawling, I decided on 2 lovely cones of Harrisville Shetland in Periwinkle. It was my first time using wool on cones and I loved it. I slowly and rhythmically wound off huge hanks using the back of my rocking chair. I remember washing them in eucalyptus wool wash and rigging a hanger on the patio for the hanks to dry. Then it was hand winding for days with my nostepinde, resulting in these huge, wonderfully scented ostrich eggs.

The lace pattern was a challenge for me, and like the rest of my life, I struggled for years, wrestling with it in spurts — it just didn’t seem like I would ever get the hang of it or that it would ever be finished. A dear friend relentlessly encouraged me, and later when I finally had the courage to let others know what I had been living with, this dear friend encouraged me all the more to finish it.

And finish, I did. Without effort, I memorized the lace pattern and it just knit itself over a few weeks this summer. I washed and blocked it and after two days of drying on my floor, my 5yr old work in progress was a finished object!

It is so special to me now and I wear it with pride. I openly praise myself for completing such a formidable task, for being patient and diligent and for the beautiful outcome. Sometimes I don’t know if I’m talking about the shrug or my life.