Coping one stitch at a time during lengthy pandemic

A Moncton art teacher says a mitred square blanket she started knitting during March break 2020 has helped her cope during the pandemic.

"It's important to know what brings you joy and helps you feel calm, if you look back over the last two years," said Jennifer Aikman-Smith, who is also an award-winning writer and illustrator.

"You can't always control what life is going to throw at you, but you can control how you react to it."

Aikman-Smith started knitting when her children were playing volleyball. She said it stopped her from biting her nails during tense games. 

Now, she knits at school. She knits before bed. She knits on car trips.

She says her husband jokes he's going to die of "second-hand knitter's lung," or "cough up a bootie," from inhaling bits of yarn fluff.

She's always looking for a new knitting technique to try and spotted the mitred square blanket pattern on a website called The Knitting Squirrel. 

The pattern's feature is that the squares are knitted one onto another with no need to sew anything together.

After that March break two years ago, Aikman-Smith said, when things were starting to get weird, she stopped on her way home from school one day to stock up on a bit more yarn.

At the time she had "no sweet clue" that knitting project would become her "isolation blanket" and her sanity for the next 20 months.

"Some days I only did a few rows. Other days it might be two blocks. But the knitting anchored me and it calmed me. It was fun to do and the time was going to go by anyway."

Aikman-Smith said she loves knitting and finds it relaxing.  

But this project did present a challenge because she had to use math to figure out how many grams of yarn she'd need.

And she had to let go of being finicky and go with the "the randomness" of the variegated yarn she was using.

"It was a good teacher that sometimes you need to allow what you're creating to go where it needs to go instead of what you think it needs to be," she said.

She finished her blanket last November and says its wonderful random chaos of colours now adorns her living room.

And it still brings her comfort and joy.

"Any time the world has been weird, I can just grab it, unfold it and disappear into my blanket fort and remember how much fun I had knitting it."

Mitred square blankets are sometimes called memory blankets. They can be made from leftover yarn from many other projects.

Aikman-Smith chose yarn especially for her project, but she said her blanket still holds memories that will last a lifetime.

"When we're going through a major event in history … you don't sort of know how the story is going to unfold. I'll always have this to look back on it."