Children and grown-ups alike stop to put their hands on the wool, to sink their fingers between the strands. Thus, in spite of the stigma I associated with handcrafts in my early years, Saoirse and Ula have grown up beside a knitting basket. For a brief period she would take to picking up her knitting whenever she saw me doing it. And while Saoirse had begun learning to knit and weave, Ula figured out how to use scissors. As soon as any of us were distracted with something else, that clever girl would chop Saoirse’s knitting yarn into 6-inch segments, snip unfinished weaving projects off the loom, slice through a square of Saoirse’s carefully formed garter stitches.