Sarah Lydon

Available for the first time in paperback, The Knitting Sutra reveals how women can learn to knit their way to nirvana. When Susan Gordon Lydon was coping with a broken arm, her craft took on new significance. While knitting was essential to strengthening her hands, it also provided her with a newfound sense of peace and creativity. Immersed in brilliant colors, textures, and images of beautiful sweaters, Lydon found healing and enlightenment in a way she had never imagined. Capturing this journey of discovery, The Knitting Sutra recounts her remarkable membership in a community of craftswomen around the world, from sweater makers in Scotland to Navajo weavers, and the adventures that her craft led her on. As she masters new techniques and conquers old obstacles, Lydon’s story conveys how the lessons she learned from knitting, such as stillness and interdependence, later sustained her through a cancer diagnosis and even the incapacitation of her hands. The Knitting Sutra is both a meditation on craft and an affirmation for anyone seeking heartfelt comfort.

From the author of the modern classic The Knitting Sutra comes an inspiring and colorful narrative on knitting through one’s darkest hours. Susan Gordon Lydon’s groundbreaking book The Knitting Sutra offered a new way for knitters to look at their craft—as a healing and meditative endeavor instead of a granny hobby or an indulgent pastime. The first book without knitting patterns to capture the knitting audience, it has been widely imitated, but no other book has endured so well. With Knitting Heaven and Earth, Lydon again breaks new ground, this time following the emotional ties that become bound up in her handicrafts when a series of wrenching events—a heartbreaking romance, the death of her father, a devastating diagnosis of breast cancer—leave her reeling. Through it all, Lydon finds new reserves of strength in knitting, in the skeins of sumptuous yarn and colorful thread that help her make sense of the trials of the heart.