KNITTING,  for Pat Walker, began in the 1950s as a good way to get some pocket money.

PAT WALKER: Once knitted a 41m red sock. Times photo Wayne Martin.

She sold knitted items for one and six (one shilling and 6 pence) a piece and to this day is still proud that it only took 18 months to pay for her first knitting machine.

“I thought I was very clever,” she says.

A qualified teacher and famous in the farming settlement of Graham’s Beach on the Awhitu Peninsula for her knitting prowess, Mrs Walker says she ended up knitting for  “all and sundry”.  And not much has changed. Mrs Walker and her late husband Robert moved to east Auckland in 1968 and to Howick in the 1980s, where she retired from mainstream teaching and began teaching machine knitting.

Now aged 86, she is involved in an international organisation, Missions Without Borders, knitting scarves of every colour to be sent to poverty stricken families in Eastern Europe.

“I said I’d stop counting once I got to a 1000, but everybody said I should keep going. So far I have knitted 1060 scarves,” says a satisfied Mrs Walker.

“I knit every day, normally after breakfast, sometimes all day,” she says.

After the loss of her husband four years ago, Mrs Walker says knitting has been her lifesaver.

“It gives me something to occupy me, it wasn’t easy, but it keeps me from getting lonely.”

She also knits for the Little Angels Leprosy Mission, and showed us a box of tiny, delicate white mittens.

“I hand knit all the time too, it’s mittens at the moment, I’ll sit and knit in the evening if there’s anything good on the box,” she says.

Apart from her scarf dedication Mrs Walker also teaches knitting, helps to run church garage sales, has been the treasurer of the Baptist Missionary Fellowship for more than 15 years and has had a taste of national stardom.

“I was on Paul Holmes [television show] for knitting the longest red sock that ever was,” she says of the 1995 effort for the America’s Cup campaign in Auckland.

The 41 metre-long red sock helped raise more than $7500 for the Starship Foundation.

“It took an awful lot of work. I’d like to know what happened to it,” says Mrs Walker.

She is always on the go, so it is hard to imagine how she manages to keep up her constant supply of scarves, something she has done for more than two years.

 “One scarf takes half an hour to knit and then another half an hour for the fringes,” she says.

Having been discharged from hospital only two weeks ago, after a gastroscopy, Mrs Walker says she is taking it a bit easier these days.

“It knocked the stuffing out of me,” she says. Yet already she is planning more knitting.