Why I Make • by Devon Iott

There are two kinds of women in my family: crafty and not crafty.

My grandmother vowed to finally learn to knit when she had grandchildren. Her youngest will turn 25 in March. (To be fair, she did finally make him a scarf this past winter.) My grandmother is not crafty. Neither is my mother. But I am. Since I was little I’ve loved making things. It didn’t even matter what, I just liked the process.

“You’re just like Kate,” my mother would tell me.

Kate, as my brother and I called her, was my great-grandmother. She had a head of thick white Scottish hair and made a mean molasses cookie. She was happiest doing things that “got dirt under her fingernails,” as she put it — digging in the garden, collecting flowers and bird feathers, fishing. She sewed many of my mom’s clothes when she was younger, including dresses for school dances. She was always giving away yarn-covered hangers, knitted washcloths, granny square coasters.

I was lucky enough to know her as a child, though Parkinson’s already had a hold on her even in my earliest memories. As the disease progressed and she was eventually confined to a maroon La-Z-Boy in her living room, she turned to crochet for her therapy. Even though her hands shook, she somehow managed to create piles and piles of granny squares in every color of the rainbow. I can’t even imagine how many hundreds of thousands of stitches she must have crocheted sitting in that chair.

One Christmas when I was probably seven or eight, Kate gave my brother and I each a handmade granny square afghan. His was blue with white snowflakes. Mine was white with red roses and green leaves. I remember vaguely liking it and giving some polite thank you’s, thinking it was maybe a little itchy.

Just a year or two later, Kate passed away.

When I was home for Christmas last year, I took out the afghan for the first time since I learned to crochet. I had forgotten about it for a long time but when I looked for it in the back of my closet, it was still there. I pulled it out and examined it, unprepared for how deeply it would affect me.

In every stitch I saw her. I saw her chains, her single crochets, her double crochets from nearly two decades earlier. I saw her color starts and stops. I saw where she had painstakingly woven in every single yarn end, hiding it in the stitches. I saw how her shaking hands had sewn all the squares together. She had taken yarn and a hook and she had made this for me.

I had only known her as a child knows an elder, but in that moment I suddenly felt like I knew her in a different way. There was this language that I had just learned that she had known too. I ached to talk with her about it, this kindred spirit, to learn her favorite yarn, see if she had any tips or tricks, find out who had taught her.

That is what I love about crafts. It is so much more than just glue and glitter, yarn and needles. It is a collective body of knowledge and technique that does not exist in any one place, just in pieces to be sought and discovered and learned. It is passed down from generation to generation, sometimes over centuries. It connects us to our past and the people that have come before.

It’s why I will always be a maker.

To learn more about Devon Iott, visit missmake.com.