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Kavinda Herath/Stuff
Ailsa O’Brien’s Invercargill home is filled with her knitted creations.
An Invercargill woman is celebrating 17 years of stitching together a knitting community across New Zealand, and beyond.
Ailsa O’Brien’s Knitknutz Knitting mail-out club has grown to some 200 members, including two in Australia and one in Canada, who receive bi-monthly booklets filled with the tips and tricks she’s learned over the years.
With a crafting career spanning decades, O’Brien has heaps of hints to share, but the booklets also contain ideas, patterns and contributions from the Knitknutz community.
The club was born in 2003, soon after the release of O’Brien’s book Knitting Yarns, Past, Present, How will the future Unravel? – a collection of stories about how Kiwi knitters got started.
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Some learned on meat skewers and nails, she said.
The book was a way for O’Brien to preserve knitting history, but she discovered there was no formal community for knitters in the country.
“There was nothing to bring knitters together in New Zealand,” she said.
O’Brien is a bit of a “knit nut” herself. She’s been clicking needles since she was just 6 years old and kept the first doll and blanket she created in an old Cadbury’s chocolate box.
Her townhouse at the Rowena Jackson Retirement Village looked like a craft store with her work becoming part of the decor.
Friends came to visit simply to see what she had come up with, she said.
O’Brien loved recreating pictures she had seen online and didn’t need patterns, she said.
Some of her more interesting creations included a yarn-bombed trike, a rat-shaped bookmark, liquorice Allsorts (made from felt) and cigarettes she knitted for a friend who wanted to give up smoking.
However, O’Brien doesn’t limit herself to knitting. She has dabbled in appliqué (a type of embroidery), crochet, quilting, and decoupage.
“I’ll have a go at most things,” she said.
Her latest project is a decoupage feature wall for her townhouse, using canvas panels and labels from yarn that her club helped her collect.
“It takes a lot of work and a lot of glue,” she said, but she was doing it “in between knitting for a wee change.”
O’Brien doesn’t craft to sell. She does it for pure enjoyment.
“I just like it around me,” she said.
Kavinda Herath/Stuff
Ailsa O’Brien has been building a community of Kiwi knitters.
She does, however, knit baby clothes and toys for the Perriam stores in Wanaka and at Tarras, near Bendigo Station.
O’Brien was one of 20 Invercargill women who were apart of the Precious Babies group.
The group knit teeny baby clothes for families of stillborn babies.
The clothes were given to families with little boxes and mattresses “so they have somewhere to lay their wee babies for photos”, she said.
O’Brien was taught by her mother, but said modern technology made it easy for anyone to learn.
“There are plenty of tutorials online; very good ones,” she said.
O’Brien believed the craft was great for mental health, pointing out that even Government understood its importance when it allowed the sale of yarn during the lockdown.
“They considered it an essential material for people’s wellbeing,” she said.
“My knitting keeps me focused,” O’Brien said.
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