Knitter and textile artist Witt Pratt died on May 20 in Virginia. You can read his obituary here. His obituary was full of insight into how Mr. Pratt found knitting and how it allowed him to grow in unexpected ways, which I found delightful. In Mr. Pratt’s own words, from the article above:

Like so many things, if we take the time to notice, when you’ve got a ball of yarn, which to many of us represents nothing short of infinite possibility, the world just opens up before you,” he said. “I consider myself extremely fortunate to have found this for myself.”

My interest piqued by his thoughts mentioned in his obituary, I was highly interested in seeing if there were any other thoughts of his on knitting online. I instantly looked and came up with a lovely interview he did with the White Crane Journal a few years ago, which you can read here. I was especially touched by this:

There was a saying in a children’s knitting book that encouraged these young knitters to remember that it’s only hard until it’s easy. I’ve remembered that many times because as grownups, particularly, its not every day that we ask our hands to do something different. We type, or we write or we trim hedges. Or whatever. So, there can be something about it when you’re first learning that can bring you screaming back to early childhood, probably prelingual memories that we have about accomplishment, or about frustration, or about effort involved in learning how to do something new. We may revisit them as adults learning how to knit.

So lovely, yet so sad that Witt Pratt wasn’t able to show more people the wonders of knitting and died so young.