BYU viola professor Claudine Pinnell Bigelow (BM ’92, MM ’94) compares her knitting to her music: “There’s rhythm in knitting, in counting stitches, in patterning, in color work. Knitting, like music, requires real discipline. Both are meditative. Both can be imbued with sentiment and meaning.” She loves both.
Bigelow began to knit in college, inspired by her friend Ana Preto-Bay (PhD ’02). She began with a children’s book on knitting and just kept learning. Today she knits and creates designs in many styles, including Aran, Fair Isle, Faroese, Swedish, Norwegian, and Estonian. “The work I do is both artful and technical. Everything must be just so,” she says. “I’m a finisher, which helps me do large projects and invest a lot of time. I have a Faroese shawl of incredible complexity that may have taken me a thousand hours to
complete.”
Knitting is “a creative outpouring,” Bigelow says. “Often the work of women done at home with textiles has not been valued as art—but [it] should be.”
