Funnily enough I was interested in knitting a zig zag blanket long before I began knitting. It started in elementary school when we were reading the book “Esperanza Rising” by Pam Muñoz Ryan. In the book the main character, Esperanza, is taught to knit a zig zag blanket by her grandmother and the grandmother’s description of climbing to the top of one mountain and then going down always stuck with me.
Actually knitting my own blanket didn’t feel anything like it did reading about Esperanza learning to knit in the book, but that’s not surprising. In the book the knitting up the mountain and back down is as much a metaphor for Esperanza climbing up and down her own mountains as she struggles in a new country after loosing her old life. Knitting is a connection to the grandmother she had to leave behind when she and her mother fled to America. There was a weight to Esperanza determinedly choosing to knit night after night even when her life was hard, even when her mother was sick and her grandmother was far away, that I can’t match sitting on my couch knitting with the tv on in the background.
I think that weight was what made me nervous about trying to knit a zig zag blanket. When I first started knitting I got this little pattern booklet with a bunch of smiling women holding up their zig zag blankets on the cover, and then ended up shoving it onto my book shelf, too nervous to try the patterns inside. Even though the little labels had a bright “easy” next to the pattern, I would remember the book and the way reading about Esperanza made me feel and think, “is it?”.
I did eventually pick up a zig zag pattern and found that it truly was an easy pattern to complete so long as you stuck with the instructions. The weight I was thinking about was tied to the book I read all those years ago, not to the actual action of knitting itself. I think that’s something beautiful about crafting as a whole, if you need a project to just be a project you can craft it that way. You can pick up a scarf or a hat and do something with your hands to relax when you’ve had a stressful day.
But crafting can also be a triumph. It can be something you channel all your stress and struggle and heartache into to make something beautiful at the end. Like Esperanza with her long, multicolored zig zag blanket you can finish it and see a story of how your life changed, from the start of the project to the end, and know that no matter how hard things got in the middle you’ve come out the other side.
