Why I knit (again)

When I was seven I learned to knit. Al the girls in my class received lessons in kitting, crochet, sewing and embroidery. (Boys didn’t need those female stuff; the learned manly things like pottery and fretwork.) Not hampered by a modern or feminist outlook, I thrived during these lessons. I graduated from potholders and baby boots to wearable clothes for myself when I was about eleven. From the age of sixteen I manufactured a big part of my wardrobe myself. Apart from that, I experimented I knitted and crocheted, I spun my own yarn, I learned handweaving – I had a big loom in the living room – and I took up sewing. And I liked it.

So when about ten years ago my hands started to hurt and I had to give up most of my crafting, that really was painful. The doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with my hands, save for an incidental inflammation. He prescribed pain killers. After a few years I demanded something more of him, so he sent me to a reumatologist, who put me through my paces in the hospital. There was nothing wrong with me. My hands just hurt. And my feet, and my shoulders, and the rest of my body too. More painkillers. A person can get used to anything.

I have a lot of other physical problems, and last summer it all came together. I finally found a doctor who looked a bit further than the tip of his nose, and after some blood tests it turned out I have Hashimoto’s disease. This basically means that my own body is attacking my thyroid, which get damaged and can’t do its job anymore. This is called a hypothyroid condition. As a result, I am always tired, I keep putting on weight, I get depressed, my hair gets thinner and my joints and muscles ache. There are dozens of other symptoms, but these are the basis ones. More info on thyroid.about.com, by the way.

Now I am on medication. While it takes time to find the right dose for me, I can already notice some differences. I am still tired and overweight, I experience bad hair days with an alarming frequency and I move like and old woman due to stiff joints and muscles. But I am much less depressed, I have the capability back to really enjoy things, and most importantly: I can knit!

Since I’ve taken up knitting again about two months ago, I started no less than five projects. Only one of them is completely finished: a lovely multicolored cardigan in a slip stitch, for which I got the idea from a pattern in the Knitty. I love to look at patterns an get inspired by them, but I seldom knit by somebody else’s rules. Most of the time I use a different yarn, which calls for a different number of stitches, which in turn calls for major alterations in the pattern itself, not to mention I might wish for pockets, another neck shape or something like that. The end result usually differs a lot from the original pattern. Anyway, this is my slip stitch cardigan. I think I haven’t lost my edge completely.

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