A Knitter in the Land of 25 Million Sheep

“Would you mind holding my kiwi while I order this flat white?”

Startled, I nod. “Not at all.”

With a cheeky wink, Peter Jackson hands me a small flightless bird and steps forward to place his order. Outside the cafe, newborn lambs frolic in sparkling sunlight, and a barefoot hobbit trundles by, happily pulling on his pipe. The kiwi coos and nestles deeper into my handspun sweater, the one I’ve just finished knitting earlier this morning.

“He likes you. It must be that incredible sweater.” Gently, Peter touches the hem of my sleeve. “Not quite merino. Something bouncier. Corriedale? Tell me I’m right.”

Okay, maybe this is a slight flight of fancy, but when I moved two years ago to my mother’s homeland of New Zealand, I couldn’t help but hope for magic. And the knitting part, at least, would surely come true because in a land where sheep outnumber people by five to one, I’d obviously become an even more voracious knitter than I already was.

I come by my passion honestly: My mother was raised on a sheep farm in a small South Island town, spending her childhood tumbling after lambs in the paddocks and chasing kittens in the barn. My grandmother was a knitter whose needles never stopped moving, and my great-grandmother was a master fiber artist, scouring and carding and spinning and then weaving the softest, finest blankets out of the wool from the sheep raised in her backyard. (These women weren’t called fiber artists then, of course. They were just called farm wives.)

So, when my wife and I moved to New Zealand, I thought I’d do nothing but knit with Kiwi yarn, my hands never still, churning out bespoke sweater after sweater.

But it hasn’t happened just like that.