Beverly Army Williams
Posted By Craft Corps on April 4, 2009
Beverly Army Williams
Name: Beverly Army Williams
Age: 39
Location: Granby, CT
Profession: College freshman composition professor and fiction writer
Craft(s) of Choice: Knitting, spinning, weaving, embroidery, crochet
Blog: http://www.wbnm.typepad.com
My Gram was an avid stitcher. She and her four sisters loved to crochet, although only one of them could read a pattern. Aunt Franny would find an afghan or layette that she liked and teach the pattern to the other sisters, who would make endless items from memory.
At nineteen, I decided I would use the road trip to our family reunion in Ohio to learn to crochet from Gram. We worked with a small crochet hook and fine thread. Gram wasn’t much of a teacher; she would rather rip out and fix my mistakes herself than show me what to do. Somehow, though, I created my first doily—a bit wonky, but clearly a finished project.
It would be a few years before I taught myself to knit, but once I did, I was enamored. Until I moved to New Mexico for graduate school, I knit by myself. Once there, though, I found a community of knitters, several of whom remain dear friends, despite my move to Connecticut. We met every Tuesday night, and those gab sessions were my respite from academia. My skills developed, and I found myself taking on more challenging projects, knowing that I had a posse of knitters ready to help me if I got stuck. In the same way Gram learned from her biological sisters, I learned from my “knit sibs.” More than the product or the process of my creativity, it is my crafting community that means the most to me.
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