FORESTBURGH, NY — You sit and create. You breathe. The work moves through your fingers and settles on the floor. 

You do the work and the hours pass unnoticed. They slide away from you, time has flown, until you emerge and realize something important.

Your hands hurt, your back hurts, and it’s time to stop knitting. (Or crocheting or painting or creating a poem or thinking a problem through. Working on a car. A garden. Your mileage may vary, but the point stands.) 

There’s a limit. Creative work takes time and mind, but it also takes a toll on the body.

And this is where Liza Laird comes into the story.

Meet Liza

Laird is “a knitter, yogi, mama of three little humans, homesteader with alpacas, chickens, a giant angora and a feisty shiba inu,” as she’s been described. 

She’s also one of the founders of Ragline Knits, which offers patterns, knitting retreats and more. (See box, bottom center.)

Laird has taken those skills and distilled them into “Yoga of Yarn.” The book is about life, family, changes, knitting and the use of yoga, not just getting you through the stress of the moment, but also shoring up your body as you go through your creative and sometimes shattering day.

How did she start knitting?

“Knitting and yoga are for everybody,” Laird said. “It’s not a matter of age brackets.” 

Her mom taught her when Laird was eight years old. “I still have the very funny scarf I made.”

Early creation, as she points out in her book, can be the most joyful, because it’s made without “fear, preconception or expectation.”

Laird did crafts in her teens, and was “the odd person out in high school, the one who stayed home and knit.” Hats, scarves, things practical and perhaps not. 

Then when she grew up and took on a corporate job, “I found I wanted to knit even more.” 

And yoga?

“I was 11, and Mom introduced me to it,” Laird said. “I stuck with it but also did tennis, dance, movement of any kind.” 

Balance, in fact.

Ultimately she trained in New York City as a yoga teacher. “Yoga has an interesting structure, a philosophy,” to which she responded deeply and which she explores in the book. 

Her Forestburgh home and the animals on the land are part of the story too. Alpacas are more than just adorable generators of fiber for knitting—the manure is “amazing,” she said for her husband’s garden. “It made a huge difference.”

And alpacas are just nice. “I joke that they’re my emotional support animals,” Laird said. “They’re so fun to have and they give us their fiber.”

Yarn and yoga

“The Yoga of Yarn” catches strands of all Laird’s life. The family, the garden, struggles with aspects of yoga’s philosophy, and breast cancer, which changed her life.

“It made me rethink my priorities,” Laird said. “It made me look at how I was doing things, prioritizing… a chance to think about how I was living my life.”

That precipitated a shift to teaching yoga specifically for knitters, craftspeople.

There are few patterns—it’s not that sort of book. Rather it takes the practice of knitting—a centuries-old craft with ties to spirituality, prayer and mindfulness—and winds it with yoga into a single, strong strand of craft and thought. “Yoga is not just doing down dog,” she said. “It’s about truth, breathing—it’s a lifestyle.”

Laird covers concepts such as the eight-fold path. In yoga, that’s about ethical living, self discipline, spiritual growth. In knitting, one masters a technique or a pattern, but weaves in attention to the yarn’s origins and the importance of sharing the result with others, she said. 

She touches on intuition, knowing what’s right, trusting yourself, listening when your body tells you to take a break and put the project down. 

How about nonattachment? There’s a truth for all who have a stash of craft supplies. “Use it, but don’t cling to it,” she said. Give yarn away. Recognize that time on Earth is limited and accept that some projects will never be completed. Perhaps the makings of that project could be given to another.

The importance of the yarn itself, how the fiber changes the creation. That moment, maybe, when the work takes over and makes itself. 

Laird doesn’t say it, but the question hangs in the air. “Yoga of Yarn” could be the pathway to the moment.  

The work we do, the creative work, is simple and infinitely complex. 

“Slow down. Look at things,” said Laird. “Live with intention.”