Of all the things I am, I am this.

I do a great many things. Apart from the predictable and often forgettable gainful employment that demands so much of my life, I find myself, thankfully, still able to carve out enough time and disposable income to pursue what actually interests me.

So I sew costumes, I belly dance, I cook with some degree of skill, I craft when the spirit takes me. But I would not call myself a dancer, or a seamstress, or a cook. I am not those things, though I often perform their trappings.

It's a curious sort of disconnect between noun and verb. Whether this distance comes from doubting my own abilities upon silent, internal inspection or whether the nomenclature strikes me as somehow too incongruent with those other things that I am, I do not know.

And for all of the dancing and crafting and cooking, there is still yet one verb that defies this convention and encroaches upon the world of nouns instead. It is only fitting, however, that it is that which occupies the majority of my free hours that has come to define me.

I am a knitter.

As gauche a word as it is, it is still the only label I am comfortable assigning to myself upon those things that I do. I am self taught from endless watching and re-watching of videos on the subject (wait, how do I start Kitchener's stitch again..?); from fumbling with needles and string; from cursing and frogging; and from the dubious application of the phrase 'design feature' when I'm too emotionally invested in the stitches to do much of the aforementioned frogging.

A knitter. A knitting knitter who knits.

And I don't believe that for any of the dancing or cooking or oyster diving or glass blowing or underwater basket weaving that anything will ever get in the way of this singular, firmly affixed label: I am Kori of Castbout Knits and I'm a knitter.