“Are you Rhea?” Ruth Malich asked as she greeted me at the entryway of her new home.

Her hair had Laura Ingalls-style braids that were pinned around the top of her head. She held a small bag with green yarn peeking out the top.

“Yes,” I replied. “Are you Ruth?”

She was, and after she gave me a quick tour of Georgetown Place Retirement Community’s first floor, we headed to her apartment to talk about her life as a crafter.

A woman who has done some form of crafting most of her life, Ruth, 87, is a reservoir of experience. Her crafting repertoire includes sewing, knitting, crocheting, quilting and tatting.

Tatting is an old art form that uses a shuttle and thread to create lacy designs.

“Really, it’s fancy work,” Malich said. “Now they’re doing it with needles. It’s beautiful work. … I really haven’t gotten into the needles.”

Though Malich enjoys tatting embellishments for cards, she spends most of her time knitting for charities and teaching others how to knit through the Retired Senior Volunteer Program.

“I just enjoy teaching the people – anybody, I mean whether they’re children or whether they’re adults – the art of crochet and knitting, because I think it relaxes you and it helps your brain,” she said. “They’re finding out more and more now that the knitting really helps you – like the music helps your brain.”

Malich’s granddaughter, a high school music teacher, taught Malich something she’d never realized: Knitting’s rhythms parallel musical rhythms.

“I said, ‘Well, you know, I’ll teach you how to knit.’ I said, ‘I’ll teach you the European way and I’ll teach you the English way,’ and so she said, ‘OK,’ and then she says, ‘Well, Grandma, I don’t want to hurt your feelings,’ she says, ‘but I would rather do it the American way,’ and I said, ‘OK,’ because she says, ‘it goes 1-2-3, 1-2-3 when you’re knitting, and with the German way, it’s just 1-2, 1-2. You don’t have that extra movement.’ And I said, ‘I never gave that a thought.’

“So now when I teach people, I say, ‘Are you musically inclined?’ And they look at me and say, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘Well, if you’re musically inclined, then you want to do it one way, because you’ve got that rhythm.’ ”

Malich understands rhythm as it relates to life as well as to knitting. She’s still an early riser, starting her day at 6 a.m.

“I’m a crafter, and we crafters have to get up early to do our crafts,” she cheerily said over the phone one recent morning. She’s heard that it’s not good for retirees to alter their sleeping and eating routines, because the body doesn’t know what to expect.

But Malich is not against change. In fact, after learning that knitting icon Elizabeth Zimmerman suggested people learn something new every year, Malich did just that. She has received certification through the Knitting Guild Association’s Master Knitter program – a feat she wanted to complete before turning 80 and did. She’s taken harmonica classes. She’s tried the Internet, which she “could care less about.”

This year, she’s counting her move to Georgetown as her new thing, and she might try Wii. But she’s not likely to play it too long. “I could be knitting,” she said. Besides, she gets exercise walking in Georgetown.

One thing Malich has learned through her years of knitting is that “everybody’s got a story.”

Learning those stories can be insightful: Once, a woman who’d been unsuccessful in learning to knit attended one of Malich’s classes. She asked how to hold her needle and was told to do it any way that allows her to get the knit stitch and the purl stitch. The woman put a needle under her arm and began to knit.

“There is no right or wrong way to knit,” Malich told the woman. “If a teacher tells you you have to do it a certain way, get a different teacher, because there are no set ways. You can do it any way you want to; you can do it standing on your head, I said, if you can handle that needle and that yarn.”