EDINA, Minn. -- For someone who knits to relax, Jeanne Sumnicht works hard at it. "It's obsessive," she laughs.
Every day after work you'll find her on the porch of her Richfield home, her passion in her fingers and in the socks and sweaters she knits for her children and grandchildren.
"There's always a different project," she says. "My son in law is the only one who doesn't get socks from me because he's allergic to wool."
But hers isn't just a story about knitting after work -- because Jeanne Sumnicht believes to knit is to share.
"It has been the biggest class of knitters I've ever had," says the third and fourth grade teacher in the Continuous Progress program at Countryside Elementary School in Edina.
Each morning Sumnicht's knitters grab their needles and yarn and gather around her rocking chair for reading. It all started for her class with one student offered a knitting lesson by Sumnicht. Before long, most of the class was hooked.
"I saw I think Owen and Andrew knitting, so I just wanted to learn how," said Davi Sapiro-Gheiler, a student in Sumnicht's class.
These days if the students aren't talking about knitting, they're writing poems about knitting. Earlier this year they raised 200 dollars for "Kids Against Hunger" by selling bookmarks and coffee cozies they knitted.
"They'd take their knitting home at night. They'd come back to school the next morning with three or four bookmarks," said Sumnicht.
Not every school subject is knitting conducive during classroom instruction, but Sumnicht believes something calming happens when needles and yarn are placed in busy third and fourth grade fingers.
"I take my knitting to workshops," she said, "and somebody would say to me at one time, they thought it was rude that I was knitting, and I said, 'if I weren't knitting I wouldn't be paying attention.'"
Calming, it turns out, is sometimes a necessary prescription for the teacher too. A few weeks ago Sumnicht was diagnosed with breast cancer. Lessons she has shared in the classroom also apply outside it.
"This is what I did at the doctor's office yesterday," says Sumnicht holding up a new project already well under way. "And the nurse said 'we don't normally get blood pressure that low for these meetings.'"
On her last day with her class before surgery, in her last year before retirement, it's already apparent there's a little of Sumnicht in her students. "I'll probably knit the rest of my life," Alaina Bohrer reveals as she sits on the carpeted classroom floor, her needles in hand. "I'll always think of her when I knit."
Sumnicht expects to be back with her class the last full week of May. Back in a class, bound for life.
(Copyright 2011 by KARE. All Rights Reserved.)