Not Your Grandma’s Knitting Blog

by Jena Stinar

Stephania began knitting around the age of 10, when her mother taught her how. But it wasn’t until she was about 17 that knitting became her obsession. “It got more interesting when I started to figure out about the website knitty and there being better yarn, and more people my own age to knit with.”

Stephania started her blog, Moirae Knitting, as a way to maintain her writing skills after she left her heavily writing-centered job as an environmental policy analyst. Speaking about the act of writing regularly, Stephania told me, “You get a lot better, and you can feel it. You don’t want that to disappear, and one way to do that is to force yourself to write every day. It was just like … okay, I can write about knitting.” Stephania also liked that she would be able to keep track of her own knitting by writing about it and posting photos on her blog.

While peppered with a few personal anecdotes, Stephania’s blog primarily tracks her progress through her different projects, both knitting and yarn dyeing. She began to dye her own yarn last fall, when she found herself with a lot more time on her hands. “Both of my parents have strong relationships to the arts in general, so maybe I am just a craft- and art-oriented person. I really thought it would be fun to do sometime, and I have been stocking up on supplies for a while. In the fall I had some free time coming up, and I started, and it’s been great.” Her beautiful, hand-dyed yarn is sold on her online etsy shop, and you can tell that she really loves colors. Her yarns are gorgeous blues and luscious reds. Stephania admits to preferring some colors over others but has a hard time deciding which: “I really enjoy dyeing things in the blues and the greens, and I have been dyeing a lot of kettle-dyed sock yarn to get ready for Sock Summit and selling some through consignment through Knit-a-Bit. I really love blues, they are really pretty … I knit with a lot of reds, though … it’s hard to say [laughs]. Magentas and maroons. Blues like turquoise and teal, teal especially.”

Extravagant, colorful socks are one of Stephania’s favorite things to knit, despite the fact that her husband doesn’t like wearing them. “I like socks because you get to play around a lot more with colors. Colors I wouldn’t necessarily wear on other parts of my body. You get to play with really bright, pretty colors, and if I put them on my feet, it’s like a little bit of bright colors, and not, you know, too much.” She also likes that socks are a small project and you can experiment more with them.

Stephania’s parents had been divorced for twenty years, and she herself was twenty-five, when her father came out to her and her sister. Her dad’s coming out was not a huge surprise, “My sister and I knew he had something to tell us. My sister was like, ‘Do you think he’s going to tell us he’s gay?’ And I said ‘I dunno. If he is, he will tell us; if not, he won’t.’ I was pretty neutral on the topic.” Stephania and her sister were raised primarily by her father, and she is unsure whether or not that had any bearing on how long it took for him to come out.

“It took him a while to come out to my mom, a couple of years maybe.… So it took him a few years to really be out there publicly. But now he’s got a blog, and as far as I can tell, he is totally out.” What really changed things, she believes, is that he had finally met someone. Stephania’s dad and his partner were married on the first day it became officially possible in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, her dad is allergic to wool, so she wasn’t able to knit a wedding present.

Nothing has changed between Stephania and her father since he came out. He’s just the same person to her. Stephania told me, “He’s been in the arts his entire life, and so there are certain things that are characteristics that I just consider to be my dad that a lot of other people might mark as a gay stereotype. There wasn’t any big difference, as though he was hiding his love for certain things.” She is pretty comfortable speaking to others about her family, though she did keep quiet about her dad when she worked for a branch of the military. She said, “Really, I was feeling more protective than argumentative.”

Does Stephania have any advice for aspiring knitters? “It really depends on their age level, but I would say, give it a little time because it does get easier. It’s definitely one of those things you can pursue for your entire life and always get better at it. And that’s what makes it so exciting for me personally—you don’t start out being good at something, since it’s not a question of talent so much as just practice. You just work at it, and you get better and better and better. I think designing and picking color [are] something that deals a little more with talent! As for being good at your techniques, you just have to give it time.… There’s so much information out there. Don’t be afraid to go to your local knitting group to get advice. They don’t care how old you are; they’re pretty friendly. I find knitters as a whole, especially in Minnesota, to be pretty friendly. There’s help everywhere you look for knitting, and it’s easy to go and ask for it.”

Check out Stephania’s blog Moirae Knitting for a great example of what a craft blog can be—beautiful pictures, one-of-a-kind products, and great writing.