About Me

MY NAME IS MAYA. I LIKE YARN.

Short and sweet, those two sentences pretty much
sum up what mayarn.com is all about. My yarn
love mostly comes from the fact that I am an avid
knitter, but I hope to someday soon expand that
love into manufacturing the stuff myself when I
finally procure my own real-life spinning wheel.

MAYARN IS BORN

I was born on April 6, 1977 with pair of knitting
needles in one tiny fist and a bit of yarn in the
other. This fantastical image may or may not be
true since I don't remember learnign to knit. Either
my mom or one of my grandmothers taught me
the basics. But until the winter of 2002/2003, my
affinity for the craft ebbed and flowed. I would go
for years at a time not knitting a stitch. Then I
would suddenly feel the need to knitknitknit. I
would purchase large amounts of brightly colored
acrylic yarn, borrow my mom’s needles, and knit
blobs of fabric. I never actually made anything
useful.

Fast forward to 2002. It was a rough year for me
personally and professionally, and I was struggling
with how to make my life more meaningful. I
determined I needed a hobby. Knitting was the first
thing that came to mind, but it was just an idea
until I stumbled across the book “Knitting Pretty”
in, of all places, Urban Outfitters. I flipped through
it and quickly realized that a simple, ribbed scarf
was something I could easily make without a
pattern. I didn’t buy the book, nor did I review
knitting techniques in any other books—or with any
other knitters for that matter. I simply rifled
through my memories of knitting and purling, I got
some old stand-by acrylic yarn, dug up some
needles I had packed away, and within a few days
I was knitting my first real scarf. Somehow this
time was different and about 30 seconds into it I
was hopelessly addicted.

Almost an entire year later, after knitting countless
items, including a horrible hooded sweater and
two short-sleeve tops, I borrowed a friend’s copy
of the then new Stitch n Bitch book and learned
that I was knitting backwards. Yes, backwards. I
knit through the back and wrapped my purl stitches
in the wrong direction. My methods still produced
normal looking knitting somehow; the only
difference between my knit fabric and correctly
knit fabric was the stiffness. Man, was my knitting
stiff! It took me a while to correct the
problem—remember, I had already been doing it
“my way” for over a year—but correct it I did. I
imagine it was around that time that knitting really
“clicked” in my head.

Since then, I have found my way into real yarn
shops and broadened my yarn diet to include all
sorts of fibers besides acrylic. I love knitting small
projects that give me that quick fix of
accomplishment, but am forever on a quest to knit
the Perfect Sweater. While I have come close, I
have not yet achieved the perfection I imagine. I
joyfully persevere.

THE MAYA IN MAYARN

As for the non-knitter me, I’m 29 years old and
live outside Boston, MA. I’m a graduate student in
writing and publishing and work as a writer/editor
at a university you’ve definitely heard of. Some
people think this makes me fancy (it really truly
does not). I’m originally from Michigan where I
grew up mostly in the quiet north, attended a tiny
liberal arts school called Alma College, and worked
as a copywriter in raucous, maddening world of
advertising, among other adventures. In
September 2005 I packed my life into a truck and
drove to Massachusetts in pursuit of a different
kind of adventure and to follow The Dream. The
Dream is still hazy, it’s goal undefined, but
whatever shape it takes I know it will involve
writing, knitting, happiness, and love (though not
necessarily in that order).