I often come to knitting with a deep desire to connect—through this craft—with something bigger than myself.
Knitting can be a conduit for that kind of connection. It’s more than making physical objects that may be useful or beautiful to others, more than a finished piece that gets gifted or worn… It’s also the act of making itself: how we show up while doing it, how we relate to the process, how we choose to be while our hands are busy.
On a day of shopping with my friend Sav (The Savi Squirrel Nest), we stopped into The Yarnery in Saint Paul, MN. I hadn’t visited a yarn store since moving here, and Sav was introducing me to places she loved or was curious to explore together.
In addition to a very cute guinea pig felting kit I imagined making together with my partner, I gravitated to a beautifully soft and colorful scarf on display, tucking one of the knitting kits under my arm to come home with me: the Malabrigo Linen Stitch Scarf Kit: Knit.
Made with nine colors of worsted Malabrigo merino yarn, this scarf is one of The Yarnery’s most popular patterns, created by co-owner Scott Rohr. There are both knit and crochet versions—and I absolutely love it. I love the feel of the yarn in my hands, first as single strands and then as fabric. I love choosing which color will come next, row by row. I love the playful fringe, and the way the pattern becomes familiar and grounding while still allowing the color scheme to emerge, unplanned, as I go.
Knitting can be connective, expansive, and meditative. It can feel like planting seeds—experimenting, wandering, accepting, connecting. It can explore our edges. We face decisions within the project. We notice how we respond when something goes “wrong.” Do I put the project down altogether? Rip it out and fix it? Let it be and find myself tracing that raised stitch like an anchor point? Do I seek more instructions, develop a system, close my eyes and choose intuitively, or follow my mood from color to color? Knitting invites us to explore and perhaps begin to heal parts of ourselves that resist the creative process: the perfectionist, the comparer, the inner critic.
In a society that moves ever-faster with social media, constant access to information, polycrises, and the pressure to always do more, be more, never enoughness—slow crafts can seem inefficient, even indulgent. Why knit a scarf with expensive yarn over many hours when you could buy one for a few dollars and have it in minutes?
And yet, slowing down through craft can be a radical act. It invites presence—with material, with process, with time. It can honor where materials come from: natural fibers from small farms and businesses rather than synthetic alternatives. Our labor shapes the piece, rather than machines or exploitative labor systems. Our investment can supports local yarn shops, designers, and makers instead of corporate giants. And perhaps most importantly, we get to inhabit the experience fully. We enter the flow.
That flow widens our focus as we create while listening, conversing, reflecting... One of the places I worked on this pattern was at our church’s Makers’ Spaces, enjoying talking with fellow parishioners about their intergenerational quilt, sketches of their trip abroad, crosstitch for a grandchild, and so on. That sense of connectivity—of craft as relationship and quiet activism—is what has made online spaces like Badass Cross Stitch so meaningful to me.
Making this scarf this year has underscored all of these themes for me and renewed my love of knitting for its own sake. As I’m now in the midst of my second Malabrigo Linen Stitch Scarf, I suspect I’ll keep returning to this pattern again and again for the foreseeable future. So when you see more color variations shared in future Fuzzy Square posts, know they come from both a love for this special pattern that came out of my community and manifestations of the deeper ways knitting continues to connect us to ourselves and to something larger.
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