The Knitting Goddess
   Deborah Bergman
  2000 Hyperion
    ISBN: 078686611X


Finding the Heart and Soul of Knitting Through Instruction, Projects, & Stories.

Beautiful knitting goes with beautiful stories. This is from an author who learned to knit when she was in junior high & had never gotten much further because, being a southpaw, she had to transpose everything. In her word, she summed up knitting as “ick.”

It wasn't until she was meandering around a wearable art store after a spiritual retreat, waiting for her passenger on the drive north, that she came upon a gorgeous cable knit sweater in sumptuous colors. The cost was astronomical. That was when she began talking with the shopkeeper who showed her a staple-bound pamphlet which included instructions for left-handed knitters.

With that pamphlet in hand, the two women picked out a set of needles made from wood & some exquisite single ply yarn. With memories of the plastic-coated metal needles from Home Ec. class Deborah Bergman held those perfectly made wood needles & discovered how elegant & aesthetic knitting could be. She was, well...hooked.

To her amazement the woman who was her passenger was an avid knitter & had, in fact, knitted her way through college, studying while her fingers flew. After a couple of hundred miles up Interstate 5, she took over the driving & Deborah hung the skein of deep red wool & mohair & wound the yarn into a ball. By the time they pulled into Oregon she was knitting & purling like a pro. Within three weeks she'd finished her first sweater.

Within a month after that she'd decided she had to learn how to spin her own yarn & serendipitously found a spinning teacher. Then she discovered that the major yearly gathering for the craft would be held at the fairgrounds nearby in just a few weeks. She had found a new avocation.

In Deborah Bergman's “real” work she uses two computers & found that while she waited for her browser to load or tech support put her on hold, she would “futz” with patterns & colors on her knitting needles instead of impatiently tapping a pen, grumbling or shooting off the odd email to someone else in a similar “precinct of high-tech purgatory.”

Spinning her own yarn became stimulating & meditative -- knitting her own clothes became satisfying & healing & while she had a “beginner's mind” in knitting & spinning, she was an adept in spiritual practice & the history of religion & as she spun & knitted the mythological archetypes lined up in her mind: Ariadne, Arachne, Athena, Penelope, Isis, Rachel, Brigit, Maya & Grandmother Spider.

The mother of my childhood was a knitter -- fast, accurate & neat -- her fingers would fly, her needles click & her sweaters, socks, bunny rabbits & hats would emerge upon her lap, even as the radio spun its stories & news & later as the television amused us.

I was a clunker, an over-handed laborer, pressed into service by school projects of scarves & blankets for the homeless, the refugees. When our dad bought our mum a knitting machine, it was all the rage for about a winter & then languished in her craft room as she returned to her needles in the company of her family.

For the new knitter, find inspiration from the Native American Grandmother Spider who wove a ladder from one world to the next. Here you will learn the absolute basics of casting on, knitting & binding off.

Then call on Isis, the Egyptian goddess of magic & healing for help in knitting a beautiful & sexy stole to wrap around your shoulders to make you feel beautiful.

Rachel, the Biblical shepherdess, is a knitting goddess who teaches patience. She was the one who waited fourteen years for her beloved to become free to marry her.

You know it's time to stop knitting when ”your hands, elbows, shoulders & back begin to hurt. Some superknitters eventually suffer from RSI, repetitive stress injury, so take plenty of breaks, exercise & change your projects sizes, needles & yarns.”

Spun in with the stories of the mothers of the world are technical details, pattern ideas & making your errors count, as it were.

This is a lovely, womanly meditative gift for anyone starting out in the knitting life as well as a deeply spiritual adventure into the mythology of our feminine world. While The Knitting Goddess is all about the stories of the many aspects of the Goddess, I've placed it in our Home & Garden category because that's where Goddesses belong & without the craft of knitting Deborah Bergman might not have found the spiritual aspect to her fingers' work.

A word about Jenny Rideout's illustrations -- they are magical! Aydika James' technical illustrations are superb too!

There are two Bibliographies: one all about knitting & the other about the mythology, literature, history & spiritual traditions woven into her stories.

A fascinating, informative & inspirational book -- a must for the knitters in your life. Very well done!

Deborah Bergman is the author of River of Glass a novel & Inner Voyage: A Journal for Intuitive Spiritual Discovery.
(11/04/01)

Rebecca