on knitting

I've been a bicoastal creature most of my life -- born in Oakland, CA to hippie parents who relocated to the Bronx when my father got a faculty position at Barnard College, then moved again to a quiet, leafy suburb of New York City; summers spent on Idaho's gorgeous Lake Coeur d'alene and driving up and down the Oregon and Washington coasts. But mostly I've been a New York City woman, having moved there at the age of eighteen for college, taking on a library job at Columbia University, and never looking back.

My grandmother was an avid, if quirky, knitter who for decades tried to pass along her love of the craft to me, her endlessly stubborn granddaughter. Finally, as I approached thirty and she wasn't getting any younger, my mother and I went on a little road trip to spend a ladies weekend with her, our dear matriarch. We armed ourselves with a couple pairs of size 11 knitting needles and some pretty wools and decided to finally let her have her way with us. And lo, by the end of the weekend we were well on our way to knitting our very first scarves.

After I first started knitting on that trip ten years ago, I couldn't believe the pleasure to be had in making these things -- these simple blankets and striped scarves in beautiful natural fibers -- and I had this insatiable desire to just bundle them around all the people that I loved, to keep them warm and cozy and safe. Somehow this seemed even more necessary in the face of bitterly cold New York winters, saturated as they are with an icy frozen-ness of concrete and glass. 

Eventually practically everyone I loved had an Emma-scarf, so I began selling my work and branching out into more complex forms of knitting. Teaching myself how to knit lace was a whole new experience, and I became entranced with the idea of these delicate silks softening the harsh edges of the concrete Manhattan world that surrounded me. I began focusing on bridal wear and chuppahs (traditional Jewish wedding canopies), eventually started Emma's Bridal & Lace, and grew to love this type of work most of all.

And not long after that, the siren call of my west coast relatives -- mother in Anacortes, brother in Portland -- became too difficult to ignore. So here I am, having traded in my beloved Manhattan and a career at Columbia University for an entirely new way of living, here on beautiful Fidalgo Island. These days, I wake up peacefully in the mornings to birdsong and the salty wind coming in off the ocean, the scent of lavender and peonies having permeated my sleep . 

This new piece, my seaweed girl, is an attempt to embody some of this newness -- this clear air I've come to love so much, the greens of the forests and the tangling weeds washed up along the shore, the beautiful snarled essence of living here, tentatively, on the edge of the briny deep.