2 min read
A small knitted tube — open at both ends, just wide enough for two hands — and a child with anxiety found each other in an Austrian classroom. That quiet moment is at the heart of Ursula Kermer’s decade-long project, Mehr ist Mehr (“More is More”), a volunteer network that turns individual squares of yarn into blankets, boleros, and twiddle muffs for people moving through hard seasons of life. Kermer, an art therapist, is honest about what the project cannot do: “Our project does not solve problems; it does not make crisis go away.” But it is constant, and that constancy — the weekly knitting circles, the puzzling together of mismatched squares, the packages of wool arriving unbidden from strangers — turns out to be its own kind of medicine. The blankets travel to families whose children have cancer, to people who cannot pay their heating bills, to rehabilitation centers where a counselor leaves them draped over chairs so that someone in crisis might simply reach out and choose one. Most knitters never know whose hands will eventually hold their work, and Kermer photographs every step so they know where it ends — just not with whom. She describes the whole endeavor as resilience training in disguise: choosing a color, trusting a process, watching mismatched pieces become something whole. For her, the image that holds it all is a network — “growing and moving, and provides a resilient safety” — as easily overlooked, but just as strong as the individual threads that compose spools of yarn.
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