“It’s about creating. It gives me an outlet, and it helps bring me peace in life and enjoyment. It brings me together with other people who share those interests.”
This is Mairead Ryan-Anderson’s take on what the arts of knitting and crochet mean to her — a lifelong craft she began as a young girl in her home country of Ireland.
In the 1960s, Irish schools still taught girls knitting, darning and sewing as essential life skills. Clothes were more often produced than purchased in a store since Ireland was an isolationist state at the time.
“Everything that we had was pretty much made in the country,” Ryan-Anderson recalled. “So if you wanted clothing, generally speaking, you had to make it or have somebody make it. If you wanted socks, you had to make them or have someone make them, et cetera. So when I went to school, it was very important from an early age to teach girls how to knit because knitting was seen as a means of producing clothing like socks and gloves.”
She put those skills to good use and knit her first sweater when she was seven. Her love of yarn later expanded to include crochet, which she learned from a women’s group. Crochet was excluded from school curricula because it was seen as a less useful, more decorative art, she noted.
Ryan-Anderson moved from rural Ireland to the United States in 1989 and taught chemistry at Three Rivers College. She retired in 2016, though she remains active on campus, and operates a farm in Ellsinore with her husband Kevin. Throughout her career and raising a family, she continued her yarn work and connected with fellow crafters by founding a fiber arts club in 2010.
Knitting and crochet are both meditative in their rhythms, she said, but diverse enough to satisfy her need for a challenge.
“Other than making me insane, it is very relaxing,” she laughed.
Ryan-Anderson creates blankets, clothing, toys, hats and more. Her most challenging works to date are delicate shawls in the Estonian, Shetland and Orenburg styles: these complex patterns required extremely fine yarn and took hundreds of hours.
Ryan-Anderson eschews selling her work — the time investment makes it nearly impossible to price pieces affordably and turn a profit — but she regularly gives them away to friends, family and charities like Haven House.
Handmade items make great gifts, she said, because they carry a piece of the artist within them.
“I guess in many ways knitting and crochet is kind of like an art skill, we put ourselves into it. We put our own personality into it. We make choices about what yarn we’re going to use, what colors we’re going to use — if you give the two people the same pattern, they both produce completely different results,” she noted. “Because it’s not just the path, it is your personality and style that goes into this as well.”
Ryan-Anderson says fiber artists of all kinds are welcome at Yarnaholics, including those looking to learn. Another way to get started is through books and video tutorials.
“See what stirs your imagination, and get on YouTube or join the group,” she said.
Works by Yarnaholics members are currently on display at the Poplar Bluff Municipal Library. The group meets 1-3 p.m. every other Friday at MHAM, 421 N. Main St., Poplar Bluff. For more information, contact the museum at 573-686-8002 or Ryan-Anderson at maireadknits@gmail.com.