Return to story

KNITTING THE KNOT

October 24, 2008 12:16 am

Jessi Rose glared at the tangled lump of gray and black yarn and the metal needles in her lap.

Attendance at group therapy classes like this one was required for residents of the Madison, Wis., halfway house, and the 19-year-old dutifully went to each one.

But this one, she had determined, would be her last.

That was because Jessi Rose, who'd battled bipolar II disorder and borderline personality disorder for years, was planning to slit her wrists as soon as the evening knitting class was over and she was free to return to the privacy of her own bathtub.

But then the instructor pulled a frayed mess of red yarn from her bag.

It was the beginnings of a scarf, and as the woman coached the others, she knitted away on it.

Jessi Rose couldn't take her eyes off it.

"It was meant to look ragged and torn," she said of the scarf, which was knitted with dropped stitches. "I totally identified with it. I saw myself, my own mental state, in that scarf. Something so hideously ugly and wrong and against society and not what a scarf should be--yet it was beautiful."

And a funny thing happened. She picked up her lump of gray and black yarn and began to knit.

And even when the woman with the scarf had to leave, taking her needles with her, Jessi Rose continued to work on the scrap, first using her fingers as needles, then substituting sticks from outside the halfway house.

For days she massaged the tiny square of yarn.

And Jessi Rose forgot to kill herself.

'ORDER OUT OF CHAOS'

Now 29 and living in Fredericksburg, she's a long way from that Wisconsin halfway house.

She couch-surfed and even spent time on the streets--fiercely independent, she refused to return to her mother's home--before meeting her husband online and moving to Virginia.

These days, most people call her Tonks, after a Harry Potter character who could turn her hair brilliant colors.

Her friends gave her the nickname about four years ago when she dyed her own mohawk pink. The legions of knitters who flock to her blog call her that as well.

She's not entirely sure what happened to her first knitted creation, what she calls "a black and gray piece of awful." But she's convinced that introduction to knitting saved her life.

"It gave me an opportunity to create some sort of order out of chaos," Tonks said. "I have this giant ball of useless string--and then there are these neat rows of stitches."

Ironically, the exercise that has brought her so much peace has also caused its share of pain. A decade of repetitive motion, often more than 15 hours a day, has left her with moderate to severe nerve damage in her wrists and arms.

Though doctors cautioned her to cut back, Tonks decided her biggest project was ahead of her.

"I decided I would knit an entire wedding, top to bottom, side to side," said Tonks, who intends to knit everything from the dress and tux to the olives in the martini glasses.

Her own wedding nearly five years ago was fairly traditional, at her husband's request. She agreed to wear the big, white dress--as long as when the couple renewed their vows, they did so in the whimsical style of her choice.

The ceremony is tentatively scheduled for June of 2010. She posts updates on her knitting progress at tonksknitsweddings .com.

Her husband, Mark, understands her compulsion. An avid gamer, he can spend hours playing Rock Band or World of Warcraft.

But he worries she might one day damage her hands so severely she'll have to give up knitting all together.

Tonks says that's not an option.

"Not in a million years," she said. "It's very literally how I function. It really is absolutely everything to me. I tell everybody, my id is made of yarn."

ONE STITCH AT A TIME

Her bipolar and personality disorders mean Tonks is 100 percent work disabled.

She knits nearly all day, every day, in a big comfy chair in her living room, surrounded by bowls full of fuzzy acrylics, creamy cashmeres and bulky wools and a furry menagerie that includes three rats, a cat, a rabbit and a pug with a taste for expensive yarn.

In the evenings, she carries her needles and yarn onto her front porch, where the neighborhood kids stop by, get help with homework and watch her knit.

"You yarnin,' Miss Jessi?" they ask.

Sometimes, she knits while walking around a Washington nightclub, where regulars are used to the woman with yarn spilling from the deep pockets of her skirt.

Her friends playfully tease her that she's insane. She shrugs, laughs and embraces the obsession.

"It's like magic," she said. "You take some string, wave some magic wands and you get something beautiful."

Though she was hooked from the start, Tonks didn't always find knitting so relaxing.

"Learning to knit is not a peaceful process," she said. "It's frustrating at first. You'll want to scream, and that unfinished sock is going to hit the wall. But that's part of the joy of it because when you finish it, it's that much more rewarding."

Early on, she borrowed a pair of needles from her grandmother and tried to re-create the inspirational red scarf, knitting with a garnet boucle.

But the yarn was finicky and hard to work with. And after she'd stitched 2 or 3 feet, her pet rat died. So she used the scrap as a shroud.

There were other blunders along the way--the floppy-armed sweater, the socks that weren't foot-shaped and the cat bed that husband Mark wore as a hat.

But there were victories as well. The scraps she knitted and then tore apart in frustration quelled her urges to injure herself.

When she left the halfway house, she was homeless for three months. The blanket she created with yarn from Goodwill kept her warm.

KNIT THERAPY

Along the way, she discovered that the rhythmic movement of her fingers, the smoothness of the yarn, the rocking of the needles, all of it soothed her in a way no conventional therapy had.

And Tonks wondered: Could knitting be as wonderfully therapeutic for others?

To test the theory, she started a knit therapy listserve last fall on ravelry.com, a sort of MySpace for knitters. The response was overwhelming.

Tonks' mother, Cindy Jones, herself a lifelong knitter, often comes across her daughter's name in online stitching circles.

"They'll say, 'Well, Tonks says ' and I'm like, 'That's my daughter!'" said Jones, a retired teacher living in Lacrosse, Wis.

Jones knows all about the health benefits of knitting. She used the skill to recover after each of three brain surgeries for bacterial meningitis.

"I think it's fantastic my daughter is using knitting to reach adults and young adults who need repetitive motion to ease the mind," Jones said. "The ripple effect is endless."

After starting the listserve, Tonks wrote a book exploring the links between mental health and knitting. She's still looking for a publisher.

But all the while, she pondered how to knit her dream-wedding/vow-renewal ceremony.

She picked up her needles in January.

A VOW TO KEEP KNITTING

Some elements, like the lily boutonniere and bow tie for her husband, have come together smoothly.

Others, like the lace veil, which required her to pluck back nearly 3,200 stitches to fix a small mistake, have not.

The tux has been a challenge. How exactly does one knit a formal jacket of Peruvian wool that doesn't weigh so much it pulls itself out of shape?

And then there's the underskirt. Will those tufts on the back look like bustles? Or giant sock heels on the rear of the bridal skirt?

"This one's actually kind of haunting me," she said one recent afternoon, fingering the cotton and wool blend.

But Tonks' tears were reserved for the top hat, knitted not, as she believed, with a sturdy blend of wool and silk but rather with a more delicate yarn that included cashmere.

Instead of "felting" when she dropped it in the washing machine--a process that hides the stitches and makes the item appear seamless--the hat simply dissolved.

"It was completely, epically destroyed, and I was devastated," she confessed to fans in a knit- ting podcast days later.

Plus, her hands ached.

Though she pauses occasionally to do the stretching exercises her physical therapist recommends, the pain in her hands is constant.

Sometimes, she plunges them into bowls of icy water to bring the swelling down.

On the worst days, when she can't knit, she curls up with her laptop and updates her blog or hunts for patterns online, often tweaking--or completely rewriting--them to suit her needs.

She researches various fibers, from silk and cashmere to stainless steel and pineapple, because she's hoping to use a little of each in her project.

And she's still toying with how to knit a tiered wedding cake.

One day, she'll go back to knitting items for friends and for sale, but all that's on hold while she focuses on the main event.

"It's kind of moving on its own right now," she said. "The knitting fates are in charge. I'm hanging on like tin cans on the back of a wedding truck."

Edie Gross: 540/374-5428
Email: egross@freelancestar.com