Little Nell was born with knitting needles in her hands. At least, that’s how she first came to author and illustrator Julie Jersild Roth: perky pigtails askew, yarn bag over her shoulder, a length of scarf trailing behind her, out for a walk with her dog on a shady street that could be anywhere in Minnesota.
That image, in a lovely watercolor, became the cover of Roth’s first children’s book, Knitting Nell.
Nell knits more than she talks – hats, sweaters, and scarves for friends and family and people in need – until she finds a way to connect with her friends through knitting.
Roth, a native Wisconsinite, has called Minneapolis – where she and her husband are raising their teenage son and daughter – home for the past 25 years.
She says she’s always been fascinated by hands, and Nell came to her while she was watching the hands of a couple of women in her knitting group who always had one project or another moving speedily through their fingers.
With Knitting Nell on the way to bookstores in July, Roth has a few other projects on the drawing table.
“You’ve heard of those moments when something comes to you all at once and it’s all you can do to grab a pencil and harness it?” she asks. “Well, that happened to me one day, in the fall, when I was watching some morning glories on the fence. I was working on something else and suddenly I just had to flip the pages over and write it all down.” That story may, with some publishing industry luck, become her next book, Glory.
In the meantime, she’s enjoying the glorious early summer months in Minnesota, the company of her kids, and some unusual summer reading.
“Right now I’m reading a lot of young adult fiction, like Richard Peck. I never read a lot, for some reason, when I was that age, so I’m enjoying it now.”
