Knitting.
I love to knit.
That doesn’t mean I am any good at it. It is my great dream that somehow, someday, the genius of the soft clickety clack of needles will come to me. I have a short bucket list, but near the top is cable knit. (I have a much longer fuck-it list, things I refuse to do before I die — like bungee jump.)
For now, I am making lemonade out of lemons by cultivating the simplest of scarves. My stitch is the absolute base point of knitting: the garter stitch, which is comprised only of knit stitch, over and over again. Do not laugh; master knitter Elizabeth Zimmerman (no relation) published a whole book of garter stitch designs.
And I’m using the wool of the Jacob Sheep, an heirloom, small, piebald (white and black) sheep that boasts between four and six horns. (The biblical Jacob bred spotted and speckled sheep.) My un-died wool is handsome in a coarse way, spun the morning I bought it from her by the woman who raised the sheep. Plenty of slubs, and even some burrs.
Plain, plain, plain, this scarf, like the one a young, lonely David Copperfield would have wrapped around his neck in the middle of the nineteenth century. Exquisite and homely, intertwined.
Jean Zimmerman 