Sometimes even knitters need a break. I’ve set down my needles for a bit and picked up needlepoint — a portable, colorful craft that feels like fingerpainting with thread. After finishing the next-to-last draft of my new Prayer Shawl Chronicles novel, my brain needs a rest.
Do you ever get tired of knitting, even if it’s your primary hobby?
I’ve hit one of those times when I want to do “something else” for a little while — much like when I take a break from my beloved dance aerobics to do yoga, beach walks, or try something new. I always circle back to dance aerobics, and I always circle back to knitting.
Right now, though, I’m rediscovering needlepoint. It’s small, portable, and easy to do — almost like fingerpainting with thread and a needle. On a recent trip to Québec and Montréal, I tucked a little project into my bag and enjoyed the mindful rhythm of stitching in quiet moments. There’s something deeply satisfying about the relatively mindless rhythm of needlepoint: no designing, no choosing patterns, no counting stitches. Just color and thread.
And here’s the real reason for this creative detour: my brain is fried. I’ve just finished the next-to-last draft of my new novel — the upcoming book in The Prayer Shawl Chronicles series. This story travels from Bruges to Sevilla, then across the ocean to Peru and Florida… and it has worn me out!
So for now, I’m resting my writer’s mind with a few easy stitches. But you know me — I’ll be back to knitting soon enough… 🧶…as soon as I finish the final draft of my new novel!
Whether you knit, write, bake, or daydream—your creative life might be more spiritual than you think.
In my life, creativity has always been more than a hobby. It’s a way of slowing down, listening deeply, and connecting with something greater than myself. Whether I’m holding knitting needles, writing a chapter, or just dreaming up new ideas, the creative process becomes, for me, a kind of prayer.
I’ve found that creativity invites us into stillness. Into presence. Into wonder. It doesn’t have to look like a finished project or a gallery-worthy painting. It can be quiet, even hidden—a moment of beauty in an ordinary day. Maybe it’s the way colors come together on your needles. Or the way a sentence finally says what your heart has been holding.
You don’t have to be a knitter to experience this. Whether you bake bread, write sermons, arrange flowers, doodle in the margins, or simply take time to notice the sacredness in the world around you—that’s creativity. And when we approach it with reverence, it becomes spiritual.
As a writer and lifelong maker, I often explore how creativity weaves its way through both daily life and sacred space. I reflect on themes of faith, prayer, and making meaning—on and off the page. Creativity, after all, isn’t about perfection. It’s about presence.
Knitting is much more than crafting a beautiful piece of fabric. It’s about weaving together threads that, on their own, may seem ordinary, but when intertwined, form something greater—something full of meaning and purpose. That’s exactly how I view my series, The Prayer Shawl Chronicles.
While each book stands alone, much like individual strands of yarn, together they create a rich, interconnected story that spans generations, cultures, and the deep role of faith in our communities. My goal with this series has always been to show how knitting, community, and faith intertwine, much like the stitches of a prayer shawl, creating warmth and connection where it’s needed most.
In the first book, The Prayer Shawl Chronicles, we dive into the close-knit (pun intended!) relationships within a small church, where knitting isn’t just a craft—it’s a form of spiritual and emotional support. The women of the church use their knitting needles to form bonds, offer prayers, and express love.
The second book, The Knitting Guild of All Saints, broadens this view, taking readers deeper into the history of a community knit together by faith and a shared love of creating. The guild connects across time, showing how past and present come together to form a lasting legacy through their works of kindness, friendship, and artistry.
Finally, Knitting Through Time steps fully into historical fiction, weaving a tale that travels through different eras, illustrating how the act of knitting—and faith—has long been a thread that connects generations. It’s a tribute to those who came before us and the ways they influenced not just their world, but ours today.
I encourage you to read each of these books not only for their stand-alone stories but also to experience how they interlace into one powerful narrative of faith, knitting, and community. These are stories of people much like us, who find strength in faith and fellowship—and who just so happen to have a love for knitting along the way!
When you think of where knitting originated, you might guess the Netherlands, Norway, Scotland, or some other cold place. But Spain and Egypt? Really???
Where did the beloved craft of knitting get started? When I first picked up a history of knitting, I imagined knitting began somewhere around the North Atlantic, like the Scandinavian countries. The word “knitting” comes from the Old English word *cnyttan,* which means “to knot.” This term is derived from the Old Norse word *knúta,* meaning “knot” or “tie.” Over time, the term evolved into the modern English word “knitting.”
Does this mean the Old Norse developed knitting? Nope. Western Europe got its knitting from the Spanish. History Lesson! Through a whole bunch of royal marriages, Spain got control of Belgium and the Netherlands in the early 16th century. What does that have to do with knitting? The Spanish brought their culture – including knitting – to the low countries when they set up their courts and started a hearty trading economy between Spain and the low countries and the rest of the known world at that time. Spain ruled the waves during this time in history.
My book, Knitting Through Time, imagines how exactly all this knitting knowledge got from Egypt to Spain to Belgium to Britain to America. No one knows exactly how this happened, but yours truly used the power of historical fiction to take a stab at suggesting likely possibilities.
Where did the Spanish get knitting? History Lesson Number Two! The first evidence we have of knitting in human history was in Egypt, of all places. (Yes, it’s hot there, but they had wool and figured out how to make socks earlier than anyone else. Think “cold nights in the desert.”) And then…History Lesson Number Three!..in 711 A.D., the Moors of the Middle East and North Africa (including Egypt) invaded Spain. The Moors took their knitting with them and left a solid culture of knitting there with the Visigoths, eventually intermarrying with them to form the modern Spanish culture.
After writing this book, I felt I had left out a huge hole in the history of knitting that came from South America. Many of our luxury yarns now come from Peru, Uruguay, and other places in South America. Crafters in these countries have long, proud histories of gorgeous, advanced knitting techniques using high quality wool from sheep and alpaca they raise. So they likely developed their own knitting techniques, right? Nope. Spain again.
When the Spanish invaded South America (much like the Moors invaded Spain centuries before), they took their knitting with them. It’s likely that the Roman Catholic nuns who set up shop to teach the indigenous peoples European ways of doing things introduced the craft of knitting to South American peoples. While weaving with wool was widely practiced to make beautiful garments and household items in South America since the beginning of human history there, the knitting skills now widely practiced there came from the Spanish.
So the next time you think of knitting as a product of cold weather cultures – Norway, Scotland, Holland – think warm thoughts instead. The History of Knitting is all about Spain!
At some point in history, humans learned to make fabric by forming loops with yarn or whatever fiber they had on hand. But this wasn’t knitting; it wasn’t crochet. It was an ancient craft called nalbinding.
Apparently, humans first learned to make fabric by sewing together animal hides, using crude needles made of wood or bone. For “thread,” they used animal fibers (wool) they rolled together to form a crude yarn. At some point, some clever person figured out how to make a stretchy fabric by winding loops of this yarn around her fingers, making a chain of loops with her bone or wood “needle.” That became the ancient craft of nalbinding.
Nalbinding in one form or another was done by humans all over the world. Forms of nalbinding have been discovered in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, the Asian Pacific islands, and among the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Apparently, the urge and need to make fabric out of a bone or piece of wood with a hole in the end of it, using a length of string of some sort was once a basic means of providing warmth, décor, and protection to a woman’s loved ones.
But how did knitting come out of this long history of nalbinding? No one knows. In my new book, Knitting Through Time, I make a stab at suggesting how this might have happened. We know that knitting was first done in the Middle East, so I came up with a plausible story of how someone with lots of time on her hands came up with knitting out of necessity, then spread this new craft far and wide. Is this “true”? You’ll have to read the book and decide for yourself!
However knitting came to be part of our cultures, I think we can assume that this craft was passed woman to woman, mother to daughter, friend to friend – just like many of us still learn to knit or learn more advanced knitting techniques. Last evening, in preparing to write this blog post, I sat down with a nalbinding needle, wool yarn, and numerous videos demonstrating the craft of nalbinding. Reader, I was an abject failure. Why? I needed a real person to show me how to hold the yarn, correct my obvious mistakes, and to guide my hopelessly untrained fingers. Sadly, I have no one to show me, in person, what I was doing wrong.
We pass on our cultures, our crafts, and the very essence of ourselves to our loved ones and to others in our communities through small moments of one-on-one demonstrations and conversations. I sincerely hope we all will keep knitting and other crafts alive through this long history of sharing our crafts, our knowledge, and our time.
How did human beings learn to knit? Historians have no idea! So I made up a whole book of stories -based on historical facts- to suggest how we as a civilization learned how to make fabric from two sticks and a ball of yarn.
Who invented knitting? No one has any idea. Knitting first appeared in Egypt, as far we can tell. It next showed up in Spain, then spread throughout western Europe and onto the Americas as Europeans settled and colonized the New World. But how exactly did all that happen? What’s the story?
Those are the questions I set about answering in my latest novel, Knitting Through Time. As a fan of early Christian history and of the “Desert Mothers,” I had to think these women could have had a hand in the development of knitting. After all, they lived in Egypt about the time knitting developed, had lots of time on their hands, and did in fact do a bit of crafting to support themselves. So of course, one of my main characters is an aristocratic woman from Rome, Seraphina, who goes out into the Egyptian desert (wearing a blue silk dress, servants in tow) and has a fortuitous accident that just might have invented our beloved craft of knitting. (She also grows spiritually by leaps and bounds and befriends one of the famous saints.)
The action of my novel also takes place in Toledo, Spain, as the Moorish invasion of this region almost certainly brings knitting to Europe. But how exactly did that happen? In my imagined version of history, a young Visigoth girl named Hilda learned about knitting after the Moors put her to work washing their socks. Her descendants then took knitting to Bruges, Belgium and beyond as the Spanish court set up shop in Northern Europe. From there, the Dutch knitters of the Netherlands may very well have taken knitting to New Amsterdam and the Americas. A storyline featuring Anna, a young widow begrudgingly living with a community of Beguines in Amsterdam, shows how she and her knitting needles ended up in what is now New York City. (Who are the Beguines? You’ll find out!)
And how is this all connected to the first two novels in the Prayer Shawl Chronicles? Remember Nan, the “Quiet One” in book one and a late addition to the Prayer Shawl Guild of All Saints Church in book two? She takes center stage in book 3 and tells us how she learned to knit at the famous Woodstock festival in 1969 and what happened next. She ends up in Amsterdam, Bruges, Paris, and Egypt, too! How? You’ll have to read the book.
Tying all these stories together is a fun twist I wove throughout the book. You won’t know exactly what it is until the last couple of pages. So if you read something in the book and think, “that’s weird,” stay tuned! It will make sense at the end. (And…pssst!…if you read the thumbnail histories in the very back of the book, you MIGHT get a glimmer of this mysterious twist I put in the book.)
As a history major at the University of Tennessee a long, long time ago, I absolutely LOVED writing this book. With all the new online tools available now, I could research all kinds of obscure facts easy, peasy and within moments. I have actually visited almost all of the locations in this book (Toledo, Bruges, Amsterdam, New York, Paris), so it was a pleasure to write a book that tied together all these journeys made over a lifetime.
I hope you enjoy reading my new book as much as I enjoyed writing it! If you’re part of a book club or church group, there’s Questions for Discussion at the end of the book. (I’m a former Christian education curriculum developer; it’s what I do.) If you’re a history buff, I’ve also included a section at the back of the book giving brief descriptions of what was going on at the times and places portrayed in the book, along with a discussion of the Desert Mothers and Fathers of Egypt and the Beguines of western Europe.
My own story of learning to knit is a story of learning a few basics from my mother, then learning so much more on my own and from other women.
How did you learn to knit? You likely could tell the story of a fundamental relationship in your life in answering this question. You may have learned from your mother, your grandmother, or another relative who took the time to spend with you, teaching something that stick with you the rest of your life. Or if you’re younger, this may be a story of finding yourself bored during the pandemic and using tech tools, like an online course, to teach yourself an ancient craft. In any case, as a novelist, I can assure there’s a rich story there.
My own story of learning to knit begins in Kingsport, Tennessee, as a teenager. I learned to cast on, knit, and cast off. She told me the story of making one and only one knitted blanket while my father had surgery on his lung, to remove inhaled debris from his childhood. I imagine her knitting away during the long hours of his surgery and recovery.
My mother only knew the knit stitch, so I didn’t learn to purl until much later. My mother taught me what she knew, which she almost certainly learned from her own mother. I imagine this grandmother I never knew knitting to calm her fears while my grandfather, a doctor, served in a medical unit in Europe during World War II.
I continued learning to knit as an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee. I struggled with anxiety and figured out that knitted helped to calm me. I sought out more advanced knitting skills from a local knit shop in Knoxville, The Knit Wits. There, two elderly women taught me how to purl, increase and decrease, and eventually to make an actual sweater. I never looked back. This was a story of finding myself and learning to seek out guidance and knowledge from those outside my own family, as I did elsewhere in my life during those college years.
By my mid-twenties, I became fully autodidactic. I learned to learn all kinds of things all by myself. That’s one thing I learned in law school – if you’re trying a case on something you know nothing about (medical procedures, auto parts, you name it), you hit the books and figure it out. Knitting was no different. While snowed in from law school one winter, I figured out how to knit cables. I became a self-learning student for life.
What’s your knitting story? What does your story tell you about yourself?
Stay tuned for my next book in The Prayer Shawl Chronicles, Knitting Through Time: Stories of How We Learned to Knit. In this novel, I imagine how we as a civilization learned to knit over the centuries. This is my first foray into historical fiction, and I’ve had a ball with it. I hope you’ll enjoy it, too!
Blessings, Cindy
Cynthia Coe is the author of The Prayer Shawl Chronicles, interrelated short stories woven around those who make and receive handmade, prayerfully crafted gifts of prayer shawls. Click this link to order or for more information.
When I tell people I write about knitting, they tend to giggle or smirk. Yes, I’m a writer, and I’m a knitter. For me, knitting and writing involve similar processes. Both take a long time and can’t be rushed. Both can produce something intricate or something simple. Most importantly, both are crafts. You practice, you continually get better. You learn new skills and develop your own personal style and ways of doing things.
Here’s what I’ve learned about Writing from my Knitting:
Projects take a long time to complete. You handle them one stitch at a time. You pick up the needles every day and do some work on your project. Same with writing – you sit down and write a page or two every day. Eventually, you have a book length manuscript.
Ripping out is sometimes necessary. Ripping out a piece of knitting is not fun. You can lose stitches and lose your mind. You might have to rip your work out several times before you get it right. Same with writing. If you have a problem in your work and know it, you’re going to have to stop, make some cuts, and revise. None of this is fun, but you know in your heart you’ll feel better about the final product once you do it.
It’s the intricate work that makes your work shine. Plain stockinette is fine, but it’s the fancy cables or other intricate stitchery that grab people’s attention and show what you’re made of. Same with writing. My work involves interrelated short stories and lots of characters whose stories weave in and out of each other. Would it be easier to tell one straightforward story? Sure, but it’s this intricate interweaving of stories that add a richness and depth to my writing.
Crafting skills count. All of them. To make a sweater or a pair of socks, you need lots of skills – casting on, picking up stitches, mattress stitching a sleeve together, casting off. You need to master ALL of these skills; you don’t sub them out to somebody else. I’ve come to believe that writing should be the same process. After saying “enough” to the soul-crushing rejections of the New York publishing industry, I learned to publish my own work. I do it all – choose the font, design the book covers, character development, revisions – just like I do with a large knitting project. For me, it’s all part of the craft of producing a book. I don’t sub out tying up loose ends, do I? Virginia Woolf typeset her own manuscripts, after all, and self-published.
Sometimes you need to set your work aside. We’ve all gotten sick and tired of knitting projects. You get frustrated by difficult patterns or just plain bored or exasperated. The same thing happens with large writing projects. You think you’re going nowhere, you’re out of ideas, the project looks too big and unwieldy for you to possibly complete. Sometimes you just need to take a break. And then, when you’re ready, you pick up that work-in-progress again, settle into well-honed skills, and you think, “I’m so glad to be back.” You move forward, and you’re so glad you did. You’re doing what you do best.
We are all in one big knitting guild. That is the message of my newest novel, The Knitting Guild of All Saints. Whether you knit well or not, knit a lot or only sporadically, you are part of a community of knitters that all share something in common and are woven together by the practice of knitting.
In my first book in this series, The Prayer Shawl Chronicles, we see community formed around the ministry of knitting and gifting prayer shawls. These prayer shawls are made with love, knitted or crocheted to show someone that a community of believers cares about them, prays about them, and surrounds them in love like a big warm blanket. In this novel, unlikely friendships form, and romances are sparked. People both within and on the margins of the fictional All Saints Church are enfolded in the love and prayers of this community of faith.
In The Knitting Guild of All Saints, the second novel in this series, the community expands far beyond the fictional Episcopal church at the heart of the action. The “Rogue Knitting Guild” formed in the first book takes off as a ministry all its own, with a surprising and highly unlikely new leader. New prayer shawl guilds are formed in churches far way and even poolside in Florida. Familiar characters from Book One find themselves in unlikely new situations. And, of course, an unlikely romance begins between two new characters.
I hope you enjoy my new novel. I try hard to keep the plot going and the characters interesting and even humorous at times. I hope you join my characters in their new journeys, walking in their shoes for just a bit and seeing the world from their perspectives. Isn’t that what reading is all about?
Sycamore Cove Knitting 