“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. [PAYWALL]
The Local Yarn Scene
After being released from two weeks’ quarantine (14 long days of being stuck in a minuscule hotel room without a single window that opened), I headed straight for a well-rated yarn shop in downtown Auckland. We’d moved with just two suitcases each, so I’d allowed myself to bring only one laceweight skein, a shawl’s worth of yarn. It would be months before the ship arrived with the boxes of yarn I wasn’t able to part with, and I was bored with the simple shawl that was performing its one job of taking forever to knit.
I wanted to make a sweater, a fast, chunky, warm one. It was July, smack-dab in the middle of winter, and New Zealand homes were famous for being drafty and badly insulated. A nice, warm cardigan would do the trick, I thought.
But in the yarn shop, I was surprised by the prices, which were higher than I remembered, and I was surprised to see that the local yarn was the most expensive.
My wife trailed behind me. “Was it this pricey when we visited last time?”
I made the universal shhhh gesture with my hand, not wanting to offend the smiling shop owner. I whispered, “I guess I didn’t notice. It was vacation money then.”
I wasn’t on vacation anymore.
New Zealand was my new home. My wife and I had sold our house and most of what we owned to move around the world to an island where we knew almost no one. Our budget was real; we weren’t traveling on vacation money anymore.
So that day, I purchased three balls of the most inexpensive yarn the store sold, the sturdy Ashford wool (milled in my mother’s hometown of Ashburton), to make a hat for my wife. If I used the right pattern, I might even get two hats from the yardage, one for each of us.
And as we moved around the North Island for the next few months, looking for the city we would choose to call home, I kept knitting. I made that hat for my wife. There was enough yarn left over to make a smaller one for myself. When I ran out of the new yarn, I went back to working on the interminable shawl.
Wearing one of the hats she knitted in her first months in New Zealand, Rachael relies on handknits to chase the chill of her first New Zealand winter. Photo courtesy of Rachael Herron
In Tauranga, I went to a knit-in at a local bar. I was welcomed warmly, and in the way of knitters everywhere, I suddenly had six new friends. But I was surprised to see that only one of them was knitting with New Zealand yarn—the rest were using brands I recognized from the States.
I reached out to touch Emily’s scarf. “Is that Brooklyn Tweed?”
She nodded. “Shelter. Isn’t it yummy?”
“Did you buy it here?”
Smiling, she said, “Oh gosh, no. I ordered it from America. Even with shipping, it was cheaper than buying it here.”
Another woman held up the ball of her Lion Brand Wool-Ease. “Got this on sale at Spotlight for 18 bucks!”
Soon after, I trekked to the closest Spotlight, the equivalent of Michael’s. Two long aisles of yarn—heaven!
But out of the 24 yarn brands I counted, only one, Shepherd’s, was made in New Zealand. The rest were American, Australian, Turkish, German, and Italian. No offense to any of them, but I wanted local wool.
And shouldn’t it be everywhere? One of my core childhood memories is of being in a New Zealand shearing barn, sliding down the wool chute with my cousins, and landing in piles of freshly shorn fiber. Where was all the good wool I was meant to be bouncing around in?
It turns out that most sheep raised in New Zealand have coarse, high-micron wool. The cost to have it sheared from the sheep is more than what farmers/ranchers can sell it for, according to the Global Agricultural Information Network (USDA Report, 2023): “In most instances farmers make no profit from wool production.”
Wool production and export are expected to continue declining in coming years, because textiles and carpets are switching to synthetic and plastic production. Shockingly, there are actually government funded trials for high-meat-yield, wool-less sheep.
Wool-less sheep.
A real knitter, of course, doesn’t let that kind of thing stand in her way, so I grabbed some Zealana Air, a gorgeous cashmere, possum, and silk blend (don’t worry, it’s not the same animal as the American opossum, whose hair probably wouldn’t be very nice at all). At $49 for 50 grams, I bought only two skeins, though.
And then the strangest thing happened, something I never saw coming.
My knitting slowed down.
Knitting What Matters
In New Zealand, no one seems to care what the Joneses are driving or wearing (or knitting). New Zealand isn’t driven by who has what. (Truly, it’s driven by delicious coffee and cheese scones, but that’s another story.)
Sure, I can admit I used to love the convenience of online shopping and the ridiculous luxury of one-click, next-day delivery, but in New Zealand, there is no Amazon. Next-day delivery means you go out the next day to the store.
And perhaps related to that, Kiwis, as a whole, mend and make do. You drive your car until it doesn’t run, and when you buy your next car, you buy the one you can afford to buy with cash. You fix the fence with the bricks left over when they rebuilt the chimney in the sixties.
My friends wear the same clothes, over and over, and I do, too—it’s a rare day you won’t see me wearing my favorite sweater.
Rachael Herron wearing her favorite handknitted sweater, an Amy Herzog design, with bold (blue) and subtle (gray) patches repairing a few small holes. Photo courtesy of Rachael Herron
That favorite sweater is an Amy Herzog design, knitted with gray wool with interspersed variegated stripes. Ten years old, it still fits perfectly and looks great with everything. It’s the only sweater I packed in my suitcase to bring on the plane with me as I moved, and I’m wearing it as I type these very words.
The American half of me thought I would tire of wearing just one sweater.
But even when our boxes arrived on the ship, even after I pulled out the other seven sweaters that I’d deemed worthy of making the trip, the Kiwi half of me wanted to wear only that gray sweater.
One day, I looked down to see a hole in the elbow.
I visibly mended it with bright blue yarn, a pop of cheery color that pleased me.
Then we got a spring-loaded puppy named Junebug who promptly ripped three holes in the sleeves. With a darning needle and an almost-matching gray yarn from my stash, I wove visible patches. They’re clumsy first attempts, bobbly and lumpy, but I love them.
My mother, the proud Kiwi, loved the things she had, choosing to fix what broke and ripped rather than buying a replacement. Now, I feel myself stepping into her socks. (Literally—after she died, I kept a pair of socks I’d knitted for her, and I still wear them on cold winter nights.) It’s a glorious realization: I can keep my beloved sweater going as long as I want to, till death do us part. The more patches I make, the more I’ll adore it.
I’ll always be a voracious knitter, of course. There’s rarely a time that knitting isn’t within reach. But now, I make what I need, or what I think friends will like. I shop less.
And I’m willing to spend more on what’s locally grown and spun. The yarn might be more expensive than the stuff on Spotlight’s shelf, but if I have questions, I can pick up the phone and call the producer. Because of New Zealand’s strong labor laws, I can have confidence that the people the producer employs are being paid a living wage.
This knowledge feels good. It feels right.
Sadly, I’ve never met Peter Jackson, not even once. And even though kiwi birds have been reintroduced to the hills behind our house, I’ve only seen their fluffy little bottoms in Zealandia, the bird sanctuary around the corner.
But I’ve found a contentment I didn’t know I was looking for, and that’s even better than hugging a kiwi.
I appreciate what I have.
And when Junebug chews another hole in this sweater, I’ll cuddle up with a darning needle and a cup of tea.
I’ll patch the thing I made, which is, after all, another way to love.
Rachael Herron is the internationally bestselling author of more than two dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, including the knitting memoir My Life in Stitches and the Cypress Hollow series of knit-lit romantic fiction. She lives with her wife and energetic rescue dog in New Zealand.
