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Zusatztext “Adrienne Martini combines her passion for knitting with her astonishing ambition! bringing to her lovely new memoir an enthusiasm which is infectious. Sweater Quest will have you reaching for your needles to knit your own dream sweater! and it belongs on every knitter's bookshelf.” —Rachael Herron! How to Knit a Love Song Informationen zum Autor Adrienne Martini, a former editor for Knoxville, Tennessee's Metro Pulse , is an award-winning freelance writer and college teacher. Author of Hillbilly Gothic , she lives in Oneonta, New York, with her husband and children. Klappentext The author of "Hillbilly Gothic" chronicles her adventures in knitting the holy grail of all sweaters. INTRODUCTION I knit so I don’t kill people. —bumper sticker spotted at Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool Festival Had I not discovered knitting, I would not be the paragon of sanity that I am today. No, really. When I had my first baby in 2002, I lost my mind. And by “lost my mind,” I don’t intend to imply minor weepiness or fleeting unhappiness. Two weeks into my maternity leave, I checked myself into my local psych ward because I’d become a danger to myself. At the time, it seemed that reclaiming even a shred of my former aplomb would be impossible. Now the whole event feels like it happened to someone else. Time is a great balm, of course. So are high-grade pharmaceuticals. But what really helped turn the tide was knitting. Now most of the drugs are a distant memory. The yarn, however, is still with me. So are baskets of knitted hats, scarves, sweaters, and socks. With some input from my husband, I also made a second kid. That, however, is a story that differs little from what we were all taught in health class. My body used the pattern it is encoded with and knitted up a boy baby this time. After my son’s birth, nothing unexpected happened. My husband and I lost sleep. We wondered when we’d ever stop doing six loads of laundry every day. My older child did her best to adjust to the new blob who, she believed, supplanted her in her parents’ affections. We did our best to assure her that she was loved. Occasionally I did burst into tears, but I was able to stop again relatively quickly, which was a big change from the first time around. I also spent some of the mothering downtime, those moments when the wee one only wants to sleep in your lap, knitting a sweater for my very tall husband. It wasn’t anything fancy, just miles and miles of garter stitch, which is an amazing tonic to frayed and exhausted nerves. Had you asked me a decade ago what I’d see myself doing in the future, “obsessively knitting” would not have been in the Top Ten possible answers. Like so many women who were girls in the seventies, at some point I was taught to knit, which I promptly forgot in favor of swooning over Leif Garrett and perfecting my eye roll. I learned again shortly before getting pregnant the first time, when the most recent round of knitting mania swept through the United States. After all, if Julia Roberts can knit, so can I. That and a fondness for Lyle Lovett can be what we have in common. I knitted a lot of hats during my first baby’s first year, simply because hats are criminally easy to knit. Once you get the basics down, even if you are sleep deprived and leaking bodily fluids, a hat requires minimal mental gymnastics. I could finish a hat in about a week, working on it when the baby was on my lap, which seemed like every waking moment of every endless day. Each finished hat made me feel that I had at least accomplished something short-term and tangible. From sticks and some string, I’d crafted a useful item. Given that the other project, who was cooing in my lap, was definitely a long-term action item, these little hats made me feel as if I could still finish what I’d star...
