Life has changed, yet we suddenly are all connected in ways we never imagined. Like yarn spun out of the same fiber, we all share a commonality that binds us together, even as we are cut into separate skeins of yarn and knitted into individual garments.
These past few months, I’ve worked on a sequel to my book, The Prayer Shawl Chronicles. In that book, members of one small community find that they are connected in ways they never imagined. They become close friends and give to each other, both anonymously and within intimate relationships.
In my book-under-construction, The Knitting Guild of All Saints, this community has fizzled out and collapsed. Members of the local knitting guild have gone their separate ways, found they need to take care of small children or move to be near family. They’ve retired or found new community or just don’t attend any more. Yet as they all move out into different communities, the love and connections they made as part of the knitting guild move out into the world to form new loves, new communities, and new life. It’s as if the whole world of knitters and those they love have become one big knitting guild.
In writing this book during the pandemic, I’ve realized that that’s what has happened to all of us knitters in the real world as well. We may not get to socialize in person at our local yarn shops or knitting groups. But we’re still connected. And lately, many of us have sought out our online knitting communities like we never have before.
We knitters are all in one big knitting guild now. We’re all still there – virtually – to ask “what are you making?” or “what pattern should I use with this yarn?” We’re still there to cheer each other on in our knitting lives…and in real life as well.
Blessings to all my knitting friends, everywhere,
Cindy
Cynthia Coe is the author of The Prayer Shawl Chronicles, a collection of interrelated short stories about knitters and those they meet through knitting and sharing prayer shawls.
Copyright 2022 Cynthia Coe
Sycamore Cove Knitting 