Thank You, Barbara G. Walker. Our Knitting Hero.
Today is a sad day.
I didn’t want my first post in the Cozy Corner to be memorializing one of my greatest idols A MONTH AFTER her passing, but here we are. I was sitting at my desk at my day job and had finished one task, but before starting the next, I figured I’d take a news break. My Google News algorithm is fine-tuned for all things knitting at this point (or so I thought), and the first article I see is The New York Times announcing the passing of arguably the most innovative knitter to have graced our community.
It’s an odd thing. I never met this woman; she never knew I existed, but she has shaped my knitting journey from the start. She has shaped my creative brain and my perspective on crafts as a whole. She wasn’t a household name just because your grandmother may have had one or more of her books on the shelf. She single-handedly changed our understanding of knitting, stitch by stitch.
What set her apart wasn’t volume or visibility, trend or fashion style. It was tone. Her work never spoke down to her reader, and it never tried to charm them, either. There was no performance in it, no insistence that knitting was sacred or precious. She treated it as a thing; a thing made of yarn, tension, geometry, repetition. Something worth observing and studying. There was a kind of relief in that.
Her writing assumed that knitters were capable of thinking, capable of noticing patterns, capable of understanding structure if it was laid out clearly enough. She wasn’t interested in telling anyone how to knit “correctly,” which stood out to me the most. There was always more than one way to decrease your stitch count, write a pattern, or construct a sweater, and she wrote about virtually all of them. The message was implicit but unmistakable: once you understand how something works, you’re free to decide what to do with it.
That approach dismantled a lot of inherited rules. Not by arguing against them, but by making them unnecessary. What she offered wasn’t just information—it was agency. And that kind of teaching changes people. It reshapes how you move through patterns, how you troubleshoot mistakes, how you trust your own judgment. It also reshapes how you think about craft more broadly: not as something handed down to gatekeep and be kept intact, but as something living, examinable, and open to revision.
Speaking of dismantling rules, I recall watching an interview of hers years ago that completely took me by surprise. In all the years she had been influencing my crafting decisions and shaping my creative mind, I had no idea she was an outspoken activist for the separation of church and state. In this particular interview, I hadn’t initially caught the sponsor of the video—the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF)—and she was asked when she started to question God. My interest was immediately piqued. I’m not sure about you, dear reader, but in my experience in the crafting community, you either do not discuss religion or just assume there is some form of Christianity involved (although with the popularity of fiber arts rising these days, times are a-changing).
Her answer was quite shocking. She went on to tell a story about her family dog, how that dog had passed away when she was a young girl, and how upset she was when her family’s pastor stopped by and she asked him if the dog was in heaven. To paraphrase, he said no—the dog was in hell because he was a dog, and only people can go to heaven. Barbara recalled thinking that was strange and had some choice words to say to this pastor, and about him. I couldn’t stop at this interview, so down the rabbit hole I went, all the way to my personal favorite quote of hers: “God was the original ‘motherf*cker.’”
Her views on religion—the belief that one person’s inherited belief systems should not govern shared civic life—come from that desire to question authority. Not out of contrarian instinct, but out of respect for truth as something that should be examined, not assumed. Much like her approach to her craft, and how she shared her knowledge with her readers and community.
What’s truly striking is how calm her questioning always was. She was never interested in persuasion or shock value to get her point across (even though her spicy interviews caused much shocked laughter). Barbara was all confidence, with an edgy sense of humor that always made you feel comfortable and able to be yourself. My personal admiration for her only grew when I discovered her life beyond the craft.
It’s tempting, in a moment like this, to talk about “where knitting is at” like it’s one thing—a culture, a set of values, or a shared direction. But knitting has always been plural. It’s always held room for the sweater knitter, the sock knitter, the lace knitter, the brand-new beginner, the person unraveling and re-knitting the same cuff for the fourth time. There’s no single “right” way to be a knitter, and honestly, that’s the best part of knitting.
What makes Barbara’s work feel enduring inside all that variety is that it doesn’t ask anyone to choose a lane. It doesn’t require a specific aesthetic, pace, or identity. It meets knitters at a point of curiosity—at the point where someone looks at fabric and thinks, what is this doing? That kind of thinking doesn’t belong to a particular era of knitting, but to the craft itself.
I keep coming back to the feeling of being trusted as a reader. Barbara’s writing didn’t flatten things into “do this, don’t do that,” and it didn’t micromanage others’ projects into “correct” outcomes. It laid everything out—what the stitch is, what it does, what changes when it’s repeated or rearranged. The knitter was trusted to decide what mattered for their project.
That’s a teaching posture I care about more than ever now. Not because it’s the only way to teach, but because it’s the most generous way to teach. It makes room for different bodies, budgets, goals, and levels of patience. It also makes room for the fact that people come to knitting for different reasons, all of them valid.
It’s strange to grieve for someone you never met, but it’s not strange to feel changed by them. That’s the kind of influence she had, in the crafting community and beyond (the FFRF, feminist circles, and more). Today hurts because someone remarkable is gone. But what she taught is still here—it’s already woven through the community in a way that will never leave and continue to impact crafters for years to come.
What an extraordinary gift to leave behind. Thank you, Barbara G. Walker.
