Michelle Obama has revealed that she hooked onto knitting to pass time during the coronavirus pandemic.
Speaking to People Magazine, the former first-lady also spoke about how the crisis helped reclaim “stolen” moments with her two daughters - Malia, 22 and Sasha, 19.
The pair returned home from college to spend the Covid-19 lockdown with their parents in their family homes in Washington and Massachusetts.
But on the subject of knitting, Mrs Obama said it was a “forever proposition.”
“You don’t master knitting, because once you make a scarf, there’s the blanket. And once you do the blanket, you’ve got to do the hat, the socks,” she said.
Her first crewneck sweater is going to her husband, former President Barack Obama, she told the magazine.
“I’m figuring out how to make sleeves and a collar..I could go on about knitting,” she added.
In the interview, Mrs Obama also spoke on the “low-grade depression” she experienced during lockdown and after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police last year.
“That was during a time when a lot of hard stuff was going on,” she explained.
She added that depression is “understandable” during such periods and that she needed to acknowledge what she was going through.
“Because a lot of times we feel like we have to cover that part of ourselves up, that we always have to rise above and look as if we’re not paddling hard underneath the water,” she said.
Her comments come almost one year since the death of Mr Floyd.
Speaking on retirement, she revealed that she had in fact been thinking about moving towards slowing down.
The Obama Family Album - In pictures
“Barack and I never want to experience winter again,” Mrs. Obama said, adding, “We’re building the foundation for somebody else to continue the work so we can retire and be with each other, and Barack can golf too much, and I can tease him about golfing too much because he’s got nothing else to do.”
