As a daily practice it can be both utterly essential and an escape from ordinariness and general worries. It comes and goes to me in waves, and it sticks sometimes for longer, creating the slowest work-in-progress garments my closet ever seen.

Roughly every year, sometimes in the fall, sometimes even in the middle of summer, I feel an urge to go back to my needles and yarns. It may start as a specific obsession about a yarn I wanna see knitted, or a garment that I want to definitely finish, or even transform or improve.

I have lost count of the handknitted garments I have made and remade, because it never felt quite what I had imagined. There is this grey sweater, the very first I ever knitted, a little too small for me at the moment, that is showing it’s second cuffs finishes. There was not enough yarn to knit all of it in this soft alpaca and wool yarn, so I mixed another yarn in an intricate pattern of my own design. I guess the yarn was wrong because it did not work. I was so I desatisfied by it, that I ripped the entire bottom brim, and later, the cuffs. I made it shorter, which fit me better, but the sleeves were way to short for a toasty winter sweater. Recently, I’ve reknitted the sleeves, and added a new yarn in a contrasting color to the cuffs. I’m making a simple ribbing, and if it works, I may do the same in the neck brim, that never looked quite alright to me.

I think I don’t get too attached to my knits because when they feel wrong to me, either the way they fit or they’re design, I can’t resist the urge to change them. That implies ripping of entire things, sometimes doing irreversible damage to some very worksome garments (my Cavalgante sweater, for instance).

Recently I knitted a tiny sofa blanket for my wool-loving-cat that is always cosying up on top of the wool sweaters and cardigans that I leave lying around in my room. I wanted a quick project to use up a lot of leftover yarns I did not want to use on anything else. As the little blanket grew I needed another yarn, so I used a bit from an old cowl I knitted in Stockholm, probably my first finished knitted piece, knitted in this white pure alpaca yarn I bought there, that was itchy as hell on my neck but reminded me of my coldest, darkest winter so far. I had no trouble unravelling the whole thing, a flawed piece full of mistakes that reminded me of my early self-learning knitting days. I even used the rest for a red and white Christmas beanie I probably won’t use ever, and might become a gift for next Christmas season, because I’m really allergic to that yarn and I know my forehead will be itchy by the time I take it off.

I think for this most part I’ve been quite unable to make good yarn purchases and to apply them in the right garments. I lack that instinct also because I’m not big on planning or swatching, for that matter. I’m more of an impulsive knitter with a lot of mix-matched yarns, which leads me to a rather disorganized list of WIPs. But I can proud myself of some knitting achievements, thanks to some perseverance and planning, I may admit.

I began knitting shortly after my mother passed away. A year or so. She had taught me how to crochet when I was sixteen, and I got quite hooked on it, pun intended, namely due to a friend that crocheted the craziest things, in this flower-power 70s revival thing that was happening by the early 2000s. We both visited yarn stores full of colorful synthetic yarns for a whole year, collecting a bunch of the worst yarns I’ve ever used. With time I became quite good at it. But I always felt crochet was meant for accessories, not clothing which now I recall as short sided or just lacking the endless internet of our days back then. I crocheted a whole winter scarf, a granny-squares bag, and many small flowers that I wanted to turn into another accessory. I made broches out of crochet flowers and Christmas tree stars out of white lace cotton yarn. I was quite industrious and very intuitive when it came to crochet. But by my mid twenties I was feeling I lacked the kind of “grown-up” knowledge that came with knitting, that would allow me to make actual pieces of clothing.

I had never learned it with my mother, although she tried to teach me once to knit Portuguese-style, with the yarn around the neck. But I did not catch the knitting bug back then, so, in 2011 on a trip to Sweden to visit my cousin who was living there I grabbed the opportunity to start knitting as she did, continental style, with beautiful wooden needles - instead of the long plastic or metal needles with a hook that I had inherited from my mother.

It was hard at first, but with time I took to it in a sort of obsessive way, watching videos online and taking lessons. By the time I went back to Sweden, on my own now, for a working internship, I had almost mastered the craft, in my own personal messy way. I slipped stitches, and knitted through the front and sometimes trough the back, with little consciousness of what I was doing. Besides being messy I loved that large learning curve that never seamed to end. It was an endeavour. One that I felt connected me directly to my mother and her endless handmaking capabilities and projects.

As I discovered later, knitting also made up an exclusive world of mine, that shielded me from my not-so-healthy relationship at the time, and sort of kept me afloat during the many years I dwelt in it. It was much more than an escape, it was my very own bubble of time and handmaking that was exclusively mine, and in which I could just allow my own though, with no interferences. I come to believe now that knitting (and also yoga, that I took up at that time) was essential to maintain my sanity and some mental clarity in amidst of all the psychological violence I endured.