Author: Anna Maltz

Originally published in Pom Pom Quarterly, Issue 28, Spring 2019

When we knit, we are using plants indirectly and directly. It can sometimes get confusing which is which. Even the most carnivorous among us ingests some plant-based nutrition and that will be part of the energy that fuels our stitches. Certainly the chocolate and wine that enhance many a night of knitting come primarily from plants (thanks to human interference honed through the ages). Knitting needles or crochet hooks made of bamboo or birch often come directly from the plant. There’s careful selection before drying, shaping and sanding. Yet, needles and hooks can still be called bamboo and birch if they are formed from composites, meaning that particles left over from the cutting and sanding of larger pieces are bonded using adhesives. It’s still a direct process – you take the shavings directly from the raw material, mix them with glue, press real hard and then start the shaping and sanding process from the ‘new’ material.

When bamboo and birch are used to make yarn, they have to go through a more indirect process. Manufactured cellulose fibres come from the bark, wood and leaves of plants, be they grasses, shrubs, seaweed, or trees. These fibres might be familiar to you under names such as bamboo, rose, eucalyptus, viscose, rayon, modal, acetate, lyocell, Tencel, and seacell. They are what are known as semi-synthetics, meaning that their origin is more recently based in plants than in the petro-chemicals from which full synthetics are made. Crude oil was once also plants and animals, just a reeeeeeeeaally long time ago, so it’s possible to think of acrylic yarn as spun from dinosaurs*, in the same way that viscose comes from bamboo – it’s not a direct process.

For plant-based protein fibres from sources such as soya bean, corn, and peanut, it is the proteins that require extraction and spinning (in the same way that milk alternatives can be produced). For manufactured cellulose (also called regenerated cellulosic) fibres, it is the cellulose that is isolated for use. To put both processes crudely, to get semi-synthetic fibres/thread/ yarn from plant sources such as bamboo and birch, the plant bits are pulped and then melted down using multiple intense chemicals. Certain parts of the goop are isolated to be extruded, stretched out, and spun into fibres. A lot of water is involved. If this process can happen in a closed-loop system, where water and waste are carefully managed with less noxious chemicals, then problems are mitigated. In the rapidly changing array of these types of fibres, there is constant improvement.

The thing is, manufactured cellulose certainly is plant-based, but much more tenuously so than we might imagine. Many people might think that bamboo goes through a process from plant to fibre that echoes that of traditionally processed tough-cookies such as flax, hemp or nettle. Though traditional processes vary and are not without their own issues, put simply, the plant is harvested, whacked about to start breaking things down, then left to rot in water (this is called retting, and is now often sped up by the addition of chemicals), so only the stringiest, least degradable bits remain. These are whacked about a bit more to further soften them and then combed before being spun. No melting into goop and reforming. You can’t get thread from bamboo (or birch) like this, no way, no how. To me, the easiest distinction between traditional and semi-synthetic processes is to think about the former as being able to take place in living rooms or small farms (but let’s not be romantic and ignore the dust, hardships and danger of any form of textile production, or forget that it is the origin of the problematic Industrial Revolution, as well as having links to slavery, past and present). The semi-synthetics, on the other hand, have their origins in labs and require factories to carry out the processes.

To further complicate matters, our ‘living-room’ plant fibres, cotton, flax, hemp and nettle, like almost any other plants, can be used as bases for semi-synthetics. Alternatively, scientifically introduced enzymes can be called into action to speed up the process of softening them for our delicate contemporary taste. Also, on an industrial scale, the raw fibres can be altered through a process called cottonising. The vast majority of machinery in the textile industry has been built around processing cotton or wool, whose staple lengths range from 10cm (for cotton) to around 30cm (for wool). These machines can’t deal with bast fibres (the general name for fibres that come from stems, such as linen, hemp and nettle) that can clock in at 2m. By mechanically breaking down the length and width of flax, nettle and hemp staples, they can be spun alongside cotton and wool. A combination of these industrialised nature-modifiers appear to be behind the sudden boom of tricot fabrics (the tiny-scale knits used especially for T-shirts and socks), containing blends of hemp, nettle and/or linen with cotton. It’s also how a lot of yarn blends come into existence for us crafty folk. We should expect these factory fibres to behave differently from traditionally processed and spun hemp, nettle and linen, because they have been developed to have different characteristics. The drape and strength will certainly be different with these shortened fibres. This is why you can break many of the new linen blends by hand, rather than needing scissors, which the more traditional stuff does. Even in the face of these new processes, the number of plants we rely on for fibres has dropped dramatically over the past 200 years, through declining biodiversity, loss of knowledge, and market forces.

Throughout human history, we have nurtured our understanding of the plants we use, through selective gathering, breeding and, more recently, the sped-up version: genetic engineering. The resulting materials can be as raw as a hand-turned crochet hook, or as processed as the evolving semi-synthetics that take the place of fossil-based synthetics. So much remains to be learnt from plants, especially with a whole other dimension opening up in the field of plant neurobiology.

Plant neurobiology is a branch of science using evidence- based research to demonstrate how plants learn and have memory. It has already been established that plants do have cognitive abilities, and these new studies are sending tendrils out to explore how far these senses extend. There are convincing results that show exchange of knowledge and resources within interspecies communities through underground root networks, much like a botanical Ravelry. The discourse around this field raises ethical and philosophical questions, echoing semantic, identity, and classification debates happening elsewhere in the human world. To a large extent, the contention lies in what these senses should be called, and what we understand that to mean, based on existing cultural norms. You see, plant intelligence takes the pecking order that has always put humans on top and literally turns it on its head, because it is the plants’ root system that is most akin to our brain- centred neural networks.

There are many ways to learn and many different sorts of intelligence in humans, and the same is true with other fauna. Recognising the same possibilities in flora shakes things up. At the crux of evolutionary differences seems to be that the type of neurology anchored in brains, as we currently think of them, benefits self-contained movers and shakers such as humans, but wouldn’t suit relatively sedentary yet segmentable plants. Plants use different cognitive systems that we brain-centric beings haven’t been savvy enough to identify or value until now. Alongside the burgeoning of artificial intelligence, we are provided with prescient reasons to scrutinise alternative complex networks and their implications.

Anthropomorphism is inevitable, however green matter definitely thinks differently from grey matter, while artificial intelligence provides yet another angle. Human reasoning enjoys picking sides, so one becomes good and the other bad. We label things. We are storytellers and listeners. This is a key part of how we make sense of the world and are moved to support what we believe. I notice this happening a lot in our world of fibres. While filled with so much warmth, care and knowledge, the strong feelings, doses of snobbery, careful positioning and greenwashing can make it increasingly hard to dig up the bigger picture of fibres – and how we process them affects our future in terms of sustainability. While my own senses prefer the more traditionally processed fibres, both animal and vegetable, I am aware that this is based largely on what I can grasp, with my hands and mind. I find it easier to comprehend and judge whether and where they could be made more sustainable. When it comes to the newer ones, I must rely on what I am told without the benefit of generations of tacit knowledge.

Biodiversity would be a great thing to focus on as the artificial elements (synthetic fibres, genetic engineering, and machinery) we have introduced expand. It’s important to be conscious of whether we are making more fibres, of any description, because the growing human population needs protecting from the elements, or simply because we want more variety in our wardrobes. A lot of the emphasis on speed and economy of production, even environmental impact, is in line with desired consumption, not protection of the botanical world, which we now know has an intelligence all of its own. We need to ask how our desire for fibres affects the planet as a whole – humanity and plant kingdom alike.

*Actually crude oil is formed from marine life older than dinosaurs, but it’s more fun to think of dino-yarn.

Further reading
The Intelligent Plant newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/the- intelligent-plant
Pavlov’s Plants: New Study Shows Plants Can Learn From Experience theconversation.com/pavlovs-plants-new-study- shows-plants-can-learn-from-experience-69794
Technology Could Allow Hemp And Flax To Break Cotton’s Global Hold On Textiles theguardian.com/sustainable-business/hemp-flax- bast-cotton-crailar
Preparation of Enzymatically Modified Flax Fiber for Producing of Rotor-Spun Yarn for Apparel fibtex.lodz.pl/55_08_22.pdf
Textile Qualities of Regenerated Cellulose Fibers from Cotton Waste Pulp journals.sagepub.com/doi/full /10.1177/0040517517 723021
Fibers & Fiber Plants faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/botany/fibers.htm
A Brief History of Regenerated Cellulosic Fibres nonwoven.co.uk/2012/09/a-brief-history-of- regenerated.html
Eucalyptus fibre by any other name oecotextiles.wordpress.com/tag/regenerated-cellulose/
Producing Forest Products From Birch Trees nrcan.gc.ca/simply-science/20327

Originally published in Pom Pom Quarterly, Issue 27, Winter 2018

When we look to the past for inspiration, we are always being selective. The past and the future are fantasies of different sorts, filtered and shaped by the present. They provide a rich seam for inspiring knits, knitting and how to wear our creations, but those dreams are always more of a reflection of current realities and desires than they are about a time passed or to come.

I find it hard to idolise the apparent realities of the past; the dominant narratives are narrow and violent and I don’t want to invite them onto my needles. The lion’s share of recorded history was/is authored by, and pictures, straight, white, affluent men perpetuating power structures that hold little romantic or creative value to me. I do dabble in imagining a past that would lead to a future I would like to be living in, but mostly, I try to focus on now. That requires some imagining too.

Let’s imagine this as a natural history documentary. Picture a camera close-up into an underground burrow, but it’s an upstairs room in a pub. Instead of a covering of straw and down enveloping a huddle of fresh-eyed fuzzballs, ancient upholstered chairs hold a tangle of knitters, animatedly chirping and squeaking. I would like you to imagine this in David Attenborough’s voice, because frankly, that makes everything better. David narrates: “Once on the brink of extinction, these beautiful creatures are thriving, even in the face of dramatic changes in the environment. We ascribe this to their ability to adapt: to function as a community, and to innovate. For these shy yet fierce creatures, it has been predominantly the females of the species, the flamboyant males and those of a non-binary nature, who have ensured their continued presence in a harsh world. Their fight isn’t over, but the numbers are healthy.” Cue dramatic music.

For a good while, it has been habit to think of knitting as historical, as part of the past – but knitting has been saved. Saved from the brink of extinction. Hell, in my mind, it’s even off the endangered species watch list. If preservation is our main concern, it’s useful to note that there were more pussyhats marching on Washington on January 21, 2017 than there are big cats left in the wild. That march was a historic moment and knitting was a big part of it. Not because knitting is inherently historic, political, liberal or feminist, nor because it was chosen by those who raised their voices and organised on that occasion, but because it makes sense within the networks of mass communication and skills available to us right now. Not as a re-enactment drama, throwback or sympathy vote, but as a prescient, vigorous, and living practice. Because knitting is thriving and adapting in many ways.

Much of the current health of knitting could easily be attributed solely to the adoption and proliferation of digital technology. This has certainly eased the formation and interaction of communities. While it is absolutely true that computers, smartphones and the world wide web have been essential, they are the vehicle, rather than the driver. To even give the digital cogs the honour of the shotgun seat would be to miss the playful joy of the constant revisions and innovations in how and what we knit. Not only in how knitting travels through society, but in the fabric itself.

Brioche, double knitting, marlisle, shaped intarsia and stacked stitches… In some senses, these techniques have always been around in some shape or form, because they rely on the existing canon of knitting stitches, but oh what we do with them nowadays! It’s not like it used to be. Almost unrecognisable. And in recognising the folks who are helping to take them places, we are also doing something modern. By being able to cite and thank those who have dedicated their time to the betterment and diversity of our stitching pleasure, we break from a past whose ’unventers’ largely flowed namelessly back into the ebb of history. So, thank you to the likes of the very alive Nancy Marchant, Nathan Taylor, Lucy Neatby, Alasdair Post-Quinn, Wendy Peterson, Jana Huck, Britt-Marie Christoffersson and Xandy Peters for guiding the adventurous to the next frontier. There are so many others, including those who are not (knitting) household names or simply not familiar to me – testimony to the fact that the knitting world is huge, encompassing many different countries and cultures, and operates on many channels, thus making omniscience impossible.

When considering attribution and authorship, this could easily become a discussion about intellectual property, copying, copyright, credit, influence and etiquette, but these are subjects worth focusing on in their own right, on another occasion. To me, knitting is inherently open-source and stays relevant, exciting and healthy because of that. It’s what allows us to build on what exists, without necessarily needing to reinvent the heel. Being able to recognise and acknowledge an individual’s contribution is not mutually exclusive with being open-source. And so new systems, such as Cecelia Campochiaro’s Sequence Knitting or Felicity Ford’s Knitsonik stranded colourwork method, allow us to relook at our approaches to knitting and firmly empower us to knit on, with a new lease on familiar ground. We can nod our thanks to Hitomi Shida and Andrea Rangel for creating and compiling new stitch dictionaries. We also have designers pushing the boat out with construction, and sailing us to places we haven’t stitched before. Captains such as Olga Buraya-Kefelian, Woolly Wormhead, Svetlana Gordon, Bristol Ivy, Lucy Hague, Cookie A, and, of course, Norah Gaughan.

Our journeys to these new lands are often made possible by tools that are innovative in themselves. Many advancements have been digital, with apps such as Cathy Scott’s StitchMastery software for creating knitting charts, Hannah Fettig’s Stashbot for calculating yarn quantities on the fly, and platforms such as Ravelry, founded by Casey and Jessica Forbes. However, gadgets such as the Sirka counter from Sarah Jackson, for keeping track of multiple sets of numbers while you knit, is a firmly analogue solution. As are those sets of three needles that allow you to knit small circumferences in the round, which appeared on my radar this year. Having grown accustomed to circulars, interchangeables, carbon and square, who even thought there was space for another kind/configuration of needle? For knitting small circumferences in the round, Addi’s Crasy Trios follow on from the shortest short circular needles with one tip longer than the other (pioneered by Kinki Ambari) – and are a sort of mash-up between circular needles, magic-loop, DPNs and the three- needle system employed when using a knitting belt.

And sheep are on the move too – did you know that farmer Emma Boyles and shepherd Susie Parish, of The Little Grey Sheep, have come up with a new breed, the Stein Fine Wool sheep? Originally crossed from Gotland, Shetland and Merino, this breed is reared for the quality of its fleece in a market dominated for decades by breed development focused solely on high-yield lambing and meat production.

When it comes to dyeing yarn, the ingredients and equipment have changed little in recent years, but hand-dyers are honing their skills in regards to scale and repeatability of previously small-batch speckling, glazing, and space-dyeing. The effect of these innovations on how colour can be applied to knitting projects as one of the endless varieties of self- striping socks, planned pooling, and fades to be found, broadens our ideas of how we knit, and is supported by designers such as Andrea Mowry and Stephen West. The possibilities are literally dyed in the wool; a new approach to intentional colour placement, standing on the wool-clad shoulders of colourwork luminaries such as Kaffe Fassett, Kieran Foley, and Marie Wallin.

Even cognitive research is currently engaged in forwarding our understanding of knitting, recently finding it beneficial for mental health and for staving off Alzheimer’s and dementia. Notably, for the latter two, only when knitting is practised in such a way as to create new neurological pathways: you have to knit something unfamiliar, something new to you. It seems even our health relies on knitting being innovative and challenging, even if just on a personal level.

Yet despite these constant progressions, we keep on thinking and talking of knitting as historical and bound with tradition. Tradition is not inherently good. There are plenty of traditions that have fallen by the wayside or actively needed curbing, including ones that pertain to knitting (hello Shetland’s truck system and other methods of low pay). Yes, people of many persuasions have knit their way through a good chunk of history, and history includes the best of times and the worst of times. Just because it has been done for hundreds of years doesn’t make knitting an intrinsically historic occupation, but it is constantly historicised in a way that other actions and skills are not. People throughout history have had sex, and in more recent history, have taken to using spoons, yet we do not consider anyone having sex or using spoons as predominantly concerned with maintaining historical traditions. So much of the ‘thing’ around knitting is about its preservation, often just for the sake of preservation. For the longevity and health of knitting, it might actually be more prescient to not constantly historicise it, and tie it down with its roots, but instead allow it to just be. It might not even need romanticising: it might actually be good enough as it is. Because, you see, currently, exactly RIGHT NOW, knitting is particularly vibrant and progressive, and to see it as simply maintaining a tradition would be to ignore how much more is happening in knitting now than ever before. Not to mention how much more is possible in the future.

Originally published in Pom Pom Quarterly, Issue 26, Autumn 2018

Like the cycles of the moon, stitches make an excellent marker of the passage of time. Each stitch is a unit, equivalent to the seconds it took to shape. When knitting in the round, we even make ourselves an alternative clock face that our hands travel round, leaving behind them indelible marks of minutes, and then hours, passed in stitches. The stitches we form are a beautiful manifestation of time, the benefits of age, and the acquired knowledge for shaping them. So why is it that these accumulated years are not celebrated, but derided in jokes about older women and caricatures of grandmothers? And why is ageing absent from the majority of images presented to us?

‘Knitting isn’t just for grandmothers’ is a very true statement in one sense, yet it often carries the implication that an activity associated with older women needs reclaiming or reinventing to make it relevant to others. Who decides what constitutes ‘old’ anyway? It is an elastic term. On a personal level, it shifts constantly in relation to our own age and those in our orbit. When you’re five, eight is old. When you are 58, 85 is old. When I was 5, my grandmother seemed old at 70; I’m now aged 39, and my 70-year-old mother still seems young. All my grandparents died at around 84, so while I am not old old, I am now halfway there by my family’s standards.

My current circumstances dictate that I will never be a grandmother, so I will not be able to use that title as a marker of true oldness. On a cultural level, old age is also flexible, expanding or contracting in relation to what and whom it is describing, as well as fluctuating with historical and geographical variations in life expectancy.

If ‘grandmother’ is being used as a stand-in term for ‘old woman’, perhaps it is useful to look at when a woman can become a grandmother as a marker of what that term can mean – bearing in mind that becoming a grandmother is an involuntary act. Let’s observe the UK age of consent, which dictates that sexual intercourse of the sort that can produce a baby is legal from the age of 16. Then, taking human gestation periods into account, this means that you could be a grandmother at 33. This probably isn’t the age most of us imagine when we think about grandmothers knitting. It is likely that we are picturing someone at least double that age, and a caricature at that.

Older women who knit, whether or not they are caricatured as ‘grandmothers’, are without doubt many moons older than the women that typically appear on knitting social media, or the models, professional or otherwise, we see pictured in knitting patterns. Knitting unites ages, and allows many occasions for intergenerational friendship, support and the exchange of knowledge through a levelling shared interest. However, there is a bias towards youth in the images produced by the knitting world as a whole, whether by knitters or businesses. The pictures that we see, and post ourselves on social media, are important, because as the the old adage says, seeing is believing.

Businesses certainly still rely heavily on the standard dogma of youth-worship in advertising. A change is overdue, and likely to happen slowly, but we can hurry it along by actively supporting more age-diverse imagery with equal likes, shares and purchases. The number of knitting designers who model for their own patterns dwindles dramatically among the over 40s crowd and falls off even more dramatically among the over 50s. I think this will change as the designers who found their stride during the Ravelry-led transformation of the knitting world continue to self-publish and model their own designs. They already seem at ease with being inextricably bound with their own branding, so one can only hope that we will have the joy of ageing along with them.

Knitters are a smart bunch but that doesn’t mean we currently have the capacity to instantly shed years of being influenced by the advertising industry insidiously telling us what type of pictures sell products. While we may want to see our own diverse selves reflected, we may not yet be in a position to actually perceive such images as anything more than a novelty, open to judgement in a way that images of ‘standard’ models are not. But we can work on this by supporting those who are already making the change and joining in ourselves. There might be an element of being sacrificial mutton, but social change relies on brave souls to push for it by being the change they want to see.

Away from the narrow frame of companies’ images, swathes of society have been turning the camera on themselves. While selfies are easily associated with the presumptive vapidity of youth, they are building up an entire catalogue of diversity. As the selfie generation ages, I hope they will continue to photograph themselves and thereby help remove some of the stigmas of age, making it visible where others have made it invisible – partly because the technology did not exist, and partly because of the flawed idea that old age is at odds with beauty.

This burden cannot be shrugged off without a formal and informal stock of images containing older people. Unfortunately, older women tend to edit themselves out. This may be down to shyness, or to satisfy personal needs for privacy, but it will not help to chivvy things along. The tools we need to share and praise images are already in our hands.

When I was a child, the superhero power I was most curious about was invisibility. I spent a lot of time considering it and the associated pros and cons. Would I be able to switch my invisibility on and off, or would it be a permanent condition? At what point would the things I came in contact with (such as food and clothing) become invisible too? And, being practical, I wondered whether my poo would be invisible or visible, once it left my body. When I felt awkward as a teen, the ability to disappear would often have been desirable. It was at this age that I was regularly told by older people that one day I would look back on pictures of myself, recognise my own beauty and aspire to such youth. In my mid-20s, I did a lot of work around making knitting invisible without erasing it (no frogging or burning). This resulted in a series of chromakey blue knits that could become invisible in a blue-screen studio. I did a lot of accompanying research into how invisibility is represented in film and television.

I found that it is usually something that men acquire in order to do unpleasant things such as breaking and entering, murder, theft, or just plain creeping around. Now I find myself at an age when I am regularly told that, as a woman, I will become invisible when I turn 50. To my teenage self, this sounds not entirely unappealing, but it is rarely presented as such.

If we want to counteract this invisibility, and see more older women in pictures and advertising, we will have to start taking pictures of ourselves more, because then the market can follow trodden paths, as it prefers to do. It is not fair to take ourselves out of the picture and expect others to put us back in. There are shining exceptions, but so much more can be done. Older women – please share images of yourselves! If duck lips, peace fingers and belfies don’t appeal, then find something that does. Advanced Style has achieved a lot by celebrating the beauty and joy of dressing up in older age, but it is still largely based on novelty and flamboyance. What we need is for it to become normal. Normal can still be a celebration and contain as much diversity for older people as it does for younger people’s fashion. Yes, yarn companies, designers and magazines do have a responsibility to show diversity in their models in order for things to progress, but that responsibility also lies in the less-youthful among us sharing pictures of ourselves, and in all of our reactions to images of diversity.

Ageing happens to us all, with every passing stitch, minute, and moonrise, regardless of race, gender identity, body size and physical ability. As inevitably as our projects grow and our knitting knowledge develops, so too does our age. Ageing is glorious; it is progress. It is something we should and can celebrate by taking, embracing and promoting images of those who would otherwise be invisible.

Originally published in Pom Pom Quarterly, Issue 25, Summer 2018

An exploration of stripes through the ages.

There is something elemental about how stripes appear in nature and as part of textile production. It is as if their endless diversity allows a chance to play, experiment and learn, through creating, observing and wearing them. They speak to the ‘of course’ experienced when making things by hand, which makes me feel connected to makers going back through the ages. Of course we would make stripes! The way textiles – weaving, knitting, crochet – are constructed makes them inseparable from striping, because it can occur so naturally within their structures.

Stripes are everywhere. Inspiration for their colour, depth and texture in textiles can be found all over the natural and made world, from zebras to zebra crossings, from strata created over millennia in canyon rock faces to the comparatively quick layers of a lasagne. You’ll find stripes in the desert, in the waves blown in the sand by the wind, and in THE dessert for lovers of stripes: the pinnacle of layer cakes, known variously as keh lapis, kueh lapis, lapis legit, spekkoek, spiku and thousand layer cake, depending, in part, on where you are in the world and slight variations in looks and composition. There are candy stripes, which, less appetisingly, have the same red-and-white helical twists as barbers poles, symbolic of blood and bandages (historically, barbers were some of the only folks in town in possession of sharp blades, so they carried out small operations and dentistry, alongside haircuts). With survival in mind, many of the cutest baby creatures that exist, such as wild boar piglets, tapir calves and quail chicks, are striped to help them stay camouflaged when they are comparatively bite-sized. They grow out of their stripes in later life. In the human world, stripes need not be something you grow out of, though our approach to wearing them may differ. Indeed, the history of wearing stripes has been a tumultuous one, but one that I, coming of age in the latter half of the 20th century, didn’t need to worry about, save for avoiding affiliations with football teams.

A little cursory reading on the history of stripes in fashion would suggest that they were not the done thing in polite company until 1846 when Queen Victoria dressed her young son Bertie (who would grow up to be Edward VII) in a sailor’s suit. These were just subtle stripes – small details on the collar and cuffs – but they were enough to start a wholesale redemption of the stripe among fancy folk. Before that it had only been lepers, prisoners, performers, pirates and prostitutes who had worn stripes. In fact, in some parts of Medieval Europe, wearing stripes could get you executed. Stripes were considered vulgar and demeaning, becoming strictly verboten or required wearing under various moralising sumptuary laws, depending on your class and occupation. Meanwhile, when the Carmelite monks arrived in Paris from Palestine wearing striped habits, they rejected the Pope’s orders to stop wearing them until they were finally overridden by a Papal Bull after 25 years. The brothers contended that their striped habit had been given to them by the prophet Elijah, who had likely dressed in the Bedouin style1. Much more recently, the stripe has still had ambiguous connotations: gangsters in their wide-stripe suits and bankers in their skinny pinstripe suits blur the line between whether stripes denote the wealthy or swindlers, or both at the same time.

By 1858, a fully striped shirt became the official undergarment of the French Navy (though note, it was the lower ranks, not the admiralty who wore it). The marinière was adopted from the workwear of merchant sailors and fishermen in Brittany. From there, similar stripes made their way into the undergarments of the Russian and Bulgarian Navy too. As with other coastal garments such as aran sweaters and ganseys, myths exist about stripes helping to identify seamen washed ashore. Though in this case, the stripes were believed to facilitate fishing them out while still alive by making them more visible against the waves, rather than to identify the origin of their corpse once washed up.

Moving on from the Russian Revolution where the striped telnyashka became symbolic, the line draws onwards to Coco Chanel who heralded the birth of leisure wear and romanticised workwear through championing comfortable clothing for wealthy women. European cool kids – intellectuals, artists and rebels such as Brigitte Bardot, Jean Seberg, Audrey Hepburn and Picasso – took up wearing the marinière. It then transferred to the USA (think James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Andy Warhol), where stripes were already forming a key part of the national identity thanks to the Stars and Stripes. Wearing them under leather jackets, the Ramones helped to ensure the legacy of the striped shirt in counter-culture chic.

Somewhere along the way, wearing horizontal stripes got a bad wrap for being unflattering. This presumes that being or at least appearing slim is the aim, which you may or may not subscribe to. Stripes do have the ability to play tricks on your eyes, giving a misleading idea of volume or creating the appearance of movement in stationary things. This is why, counter-intuitively, camouflage consisting of bold, strikingly graphic, intersecting stripes known as dazzle camouflage were painted on UK and US naval ships during World War I (and somewhat in World War II) to help confuse enemies about their outline, speed and quantity. Bridget Riley’s smart use of colour and scale appears to make the stripes in her paintings almost pulsate, causing your eyes to hum. Agnes Martin was equally enamoured of stripes executed with resolute fastidiousness, however hers radiate a determined calm. Neither artist’s work reproduces well, which is a good reminder of the intangible magic of a handmade item. Paintings are often talked about in a different category of handmade, with a reverence not extended to other crafts, though they tend to be, at their core, textile (colour on woven canvas).

To look only at the symbolism of stripes is to miss out on the simplicity and joy of making them. In textiles, stripes are the easiest way to add colours, difference, and interest. They are a feature of every textile and costume museum I have been to around the globe. I find it hard to imagine national dress from almost anywhere in the world without stripes. They are also key identifiers of branding and affiliation to sports teams (which has its historical roots in owners being responsible for clothing their mercenary armies and stripes being an easy way to tell sides apart).

At the crux of it all is the fact that textiles are easy to stripe. In a weave, stripes are easy to add to the warp or weft. Stripes in knitting can be introduced into your fabric intentionally or unintentionally in a multitude of ways: from different types of stitches and gauge, through thickness and texture of yarn, to colour. Whatever outcome you are after, knitting stripes necessitates choosing at least two varying factors. They can be subtle or unmistakable. They can be close in colour or in stark contrast. You can change needle size between rows/rounds or wrap multiple times around the needle and drop stitches to create your stripes vertically or horizontally.

For all the variety stripes can add to knitted fabric, the extra work needed to make them appear is minimal, save paying a bit more attention than you would for stocking or garter stitch. Where colour comes in, they often require just a few extra ends to sew in (and the possession of more colours). If you are a sock knitter and choose a yarn that has been specifically dyed to do so, the stripes will instantly appear as you go, with nothing required from you other than knitting and watching the colourful adventure unfold. Stripes are brilliant for stash busting, as they allow multiple colours to make up the required yardage/metreage for a project.

If you always change colour on a Right Side (RS) knit row/round, you will get a smooth transition between colours. On the Wrong Side (WS), you will get a less smooth transition with a row of purl bumps. There’s no reason this can’t be worked into the design. It will just be more along the multi-coloured lines of Missoni than the clean lines of Gaulthier or Rykiel.

Fat stripes, thin stripes; straight stripes, wiggly stripes; striking stripes, subtle stripes; regular stripes, single stripes – oh stripes, how we love them, these notches on the bedpost of knitting. As well as allowing us to add more colours, they provide targets: goals to work towards. Stripes provide an excellent motivator, providing clear, visual incentives to the already just-one-more-row/round nature of a good knit. They egg you on, while at the same time being markers of how far we have come.

Footnotes
1 For those who want to delve in deeper there’s a book by French scholar, Michael Pastoreau called the ”The Devil’s Cloth: A History of Stripes and Striped Fabric” (Columbia University Press, 2001). It’s good to note that he told the NY Times in an interview that he doesn’t like to wear stripes, so you might not want to turn to him for an unbiased view. He also isn’t a maker or textile historian.
2 Regulation uniform shirts needed to consist of 21 2cm white and 20 1cm blue stripes with 14 blue stripes on each sleeve, apparently symbolic of the number of victories of Napoleon against the British.

Originally published in Pom Pom Quarterly, Issue 24, Spring 2018. Illustration by Elena Skoreyko Wagner,used with kind permission.

Philately – nope, it’s not a fancy word for licking male members, it’s the knowledge and appreciation of postal services, which is what Issue 24 is about. All the patterns found their design inspiration in specific postage stamps, which, in turn, dictated the country of origin of the yarn used for each one. The last in this list of stamps is the Penny Black. As the world’s first adhesive stamp, introduced for public use in Great Britain in 1840, the Penny Black was created to simplify and standardise the method for payment and delivery of mail. Thanks to her success, pre-paid lick-and-stick postage was quickly adopted by other countries and became not just a way to pay for messages and goods to get from one place to another, but also a means for national priorities and identity to be broadcast around the world. So much beautiful, groundbreaking, and public-minded design has traversed the globe in the diminutive (and affordable) form of stamps. Their proliferation birthed a new hobby: stamp collecting.

As a child, I used to collect stamps with my dad. What was depicted on the stamps and where they came from triggered much curiosity and conversation. It allowed us focused time together, supported by the wider family, who clipped cancelled stamps off their post and sent them our way. Once we had a good amount ready to go, we would soak the stamps off the fragments of envelope. It was a delicate balance of timing – they needed to be in the water long enough to dissolve the foul-tasting glue, but not so long that the stamps became mushy. Soaking happened in a brown glass measuring jug, out of which we would fish the stamps and carefully place them to dry on sheets of kitchen roll. Once dry, the stamps would be pressed between books to flatten them. From there, if we were being diligent, they would go straight into special stamp albums. Where to slot in new ones was an exercise in decision-making, grouping and cataloguing. As I write this, I realise how akin that process is to the one I undergo when finishing, blocking and posting a knit! I have given up stamp collecting, but its spirit lives on in my knitting practice.

The world wide web and other advances in technology have had a profound effect on analogue hobbies. Stamp collecting, trainspotting and ham radio seem unlikely to survive more than a couple more generations in current conditions. For other hobbies, such as knitting, it has been their salvation. While knitters often fixate on the gloriously hands-on-ness of knitting and celebrate historical styles and stories, it is our embrace of new technologies that has guaranteed handknitting’s survival as a contemporary pastime. Some of the language of knitting, however, is definitely the remnants of a different era: remnants that are worth examining, if not abandoning altogether.

I’m specifically thinking of the terms we use for how we form our stitches. The question “Do you knit ‘English’ or ‘Continental’?” might seem innocent enough, but them’s fighting words: the terms are a wartime throwback. Comparable to how German Shepherd Dogs became known as Alsatians and the Saxe-Coburg family became Windsors, ‘German style’ became known as Continental during and after the second world war as a way to avoid associations with Germany. However, while this neatly avoided namechecking a foe, the usage of ‘English’ as a catch-all to include Scottish, Welsh or Irish methods dredges up even older battles and nationalism. Differentiating oneself from ‘enemies’ might be understandable while bombs (or arrows) drop, and grudges stick around, though it is possible that antipathy may have waned enough to revert to calling it ‘German style’ once more. This would certainly better identify the origins of this method, in-line with the contemporary preoccupation with citing source – but perhaps we are better off using non-geographic terms to carry us into the future?

Throwing and picking are already in play as perfectly functioning alternatives to English and Continental.

In regards to knitting (but not fruit, trash, scabs or noses), a picker is someone who holds the yarn in their non-dominant hand and ‘picks’ it with the needle tip (held in their dominant hand) to scoop it through the existing stitch. This is what is still regularly called Continental style (as opposed to doing The Continental, which involves channelling Fred and Ginger). ‘The continent’ is an old-fashioned British-English term for other European, non-British or Irish countries. With all the regressive speak of late, it’s good to remember that, regardless of political affiliations, technically all of Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) and both sides of Ireland, are on the continent of Europe (and Eurasia, if looking at an even bigger landmass). ‘The continent’ though, described, en masse, the countries you’d reach by crossing the English Channel. Being ‘on the continent’ presupposed it was not your original or permanent location. Something preferable to being incontinent, of course, but not necessarily somewhere you’d describe yourself as being nowadays.

The truth is, ‘the continent’ is an increasingly quaint term for describing mainland Europe. This might make it endearing to use for knitters (who embrace many bygone pleasures), if it weren’t misleading as a marker of how people on ‘the continent’ knitted at the time that phrase was in more prolific use. Before our current epoch of internet-fuelled knitting (where we can share and learn so much from all over the world in an instant), knitters in Belgium, The Netherlands, France and Spain were primarily throwers. Many continue to be. A thrower is someone who forms their stitches by ‘throwing’ the yarn around the tip of the needle with their dominant hand. They often let go of this needle (also being held in their dominant hand) to such an extent that they can bring the yarn around the needle tip while it is inserted in the existing stitch to form the loop that will be pulled through to form the new stitch. You might know this as English style. In Japan it’s sometimes called French style. Many in Italy still call picking ‘alla tedesca’ (German style), because that is how they knit in the Northern regions, closer to Germany, whereas the entire peninsula threw their stitches ‘Italian style’ – so go figure. We can’t ignore that all these countries had empires which spread their knitting peculiarities (along with less pleasant practices), at the same time as they returned home with treasures. It’s worth noting that Portugal and many of the countries touched by its empire-building past have a completely different way of holding their knitting, with the yarn tensioned around the back of the neck while working with the wrong side facing.

Going in deeper, there’s also ‘flicking’ and ‘combined’, alongside a handful of others, to further identify, with increased precision, the variations of methods used to form stitches. Rootling around elsewhere in our basket of knitting language brings us to noxious terms such as ‘parlour knitting’ AKA ‘drawing-room knitting’ to describe a way to hold one’s needles to communicate refinement and poise. To me, these are even hairier than using English and Continental, as these terms were used to separate ‘ladies’ from women. They aimed to differentiate those who knit as a genteel hobby from those who knit in order to be able to clothe themselves and their families or earn an income.

So what does all this have to do with philately? Stamps travel the world as markers of national identity, because they are, the currency that pays for the passage of hard-copy words, pictures and items from one place to another, from one person to another. As with stamps, knitting (which significantly predates them) exists all over the world because of the movement of people and the sharing of information, innovation and inspiration. The long history of textiles stems from their portability for shelter, trade and beauty. Though styles of knitting can be adopted as markers of national identity, they are only transiently part of a place. On the whole, they came from a community or individual somewhere else. They stopped for a while, were fed and watered with knowledge and enthusiasm, then moved on elsewhere with added bells and whistles. Of course knitting styles are not legal currency like stamps are, so anchoring them to a place is much more complicated. There are increasing levels of sensitivity and knowledge around provenance, both of yarn and sheep and of design styles and inspiration, but at the same time there is a more global taste-making network which makes it harder for these things to exist in the future.

Continuing to use the terms ‘English’ and ‘Continental’ in regards to knitting style seems to me odd, on so many levels. They are geographically misleading, if not downright incorrect, terms that don’t mesh with the modern focus on correctly citing provenance and heritage. Besides, with their origins in nationalistic battle-speak, surely they are incongruous with a view of knitting as a peaceful and sociable activity. Admittedly, all this is a question of semantics, because they function as descriptive terms in common usage among English-speaking knitters. But the same could be said for many other descriptive words we would never dream of using in the present day.

Knitting practice has embraced the best of modern technology, now let’s make knitting language properly reflect our changing times too, so that it can serve as a model for the sensitive, diverse and smart community we aspire to be. Let’s go with throwing (out outdated language) and picking (new words that work for now.

Originally published in Pom Pom Quarterly, Issue 23, Winter 2017

It is said that there are many ways to skin a cat. Indeed, there are many ways to shear a sheep. Of course, this is much more animal-friendly as the sheep survive the process.

But there are hundreds of ways to release the fleece, with diverse results in regards to comfort of the sheep during and after the process, speed, ease for the shearer, and quality of the resulting wool. No matter how carefully the process is tailored to all those involved, ovine and human alike, there will still be individuals who think it should be done differently. Others believe that we should eschew the use of anything recently animal-based altogether. I say ‘recently’ because the petro-chemicals that produce plastics often used in substitutes for animal-based products such as pleather and acrylic come from long-dead dinosaurs. And it’s terribly difficult to ensure that no insects are hurt in the harvesting of vegetable-based fibres… but now I’m clutching at straws. Why can’t anything ever be straightforward? Good or bad. An indisputable best way to do The Thing.

Everything we do when we knit and crochet, starting with the tools and yarn, through cast-on to the final blocking and the whole lot in between, involves a million possible variants, and thus choices to be made. Does this mean it’s complicated? Not necessarily. A project is as simple or involved as you make it. Is easy better? Yes, if that’s how you like it. Is complicated bad? Not in the slightest, if that’s what appeals. There is a lot to know, but you don’t need to know it all, and it’s unlikely you ever could. For example, there are more ways to cast on than you can count. Can the same cast-on your grandma taught you when you were five see you through your whole life? Of course. Is it good to be aware that you have options and that there are different ways to do things? Hell yes! Could you dedicate your life to trying, then perfecting, every single cast-on and never use them to make a finished item? Sure.

Whether you are the sort who rolls with your existing arsenal of knitting skills or adds to it continuously, the beauty of knitting lies in yarn’s potential to become any number of things in a multitude of ways. Regardless of the depth of your knowledge, simply knowing how to knit (and/or crochet) is great, full stop. It gives you the option to make things, make choices, and entertain yourself. It’s easy to default into thinking other people know better. If you find yourself heading that way, stop and acknowledge that what you know has value and whatever else you choose to take on board is an addition to your already practical skill set. It’s also likely that you have worked out a successful way to do something that a knitter you idolise would find useful and inspirational. We all have something to learn from each other. As adults we are inclined to beat ourselves up for what we don’t know, rather than gazing at the thrill of all there is yet to discover with childlike wonder.

If you know a significant amount, you might fall into the trap of thinking your favourite way is the only right one, or that there is always a better way out there, maybe one that everyone else knows except you. Let’s not beat ourselves up about what we don’t know, or blame others for what they don’t know either. The important thing is to feel satisfied. Satisfaction is one of the hardest states to achieve in contemporary life, where we are constantly bombarded with advertising that stabs us with the triple-edged sword of desire, FOMO, and self-doubt. It’s hard to be immune to it. Knitting is used as therapy in various ways – grief counselling, anger management, anxiety control, confidence building – but the greatest gift of knitting (and maybe the key to its sustained efficacy) is the satisfaction it gives us in allowing our brains to puzzle over an engaging and productive task. A task that is attainable and under our control. We can enjoy the fruits of our labour both while it is a WIP and once it is an FO. The fact that there is always something else to learn and another variation to try is what keeps us sniffing the wool fumes. It’s a reminder of the joyous state of wonder you experience when you discover that something you love has infinite applications and possibilities, but just doing it is exciting enough.

When I teach a knitting class of any level, I go in knowing I will learn something too, not because I don’t know enough or am passing the buck of my responsibilities over to an unwitting class participant (or the one who just adores sharing the vastness of their knowledge), but because there’s infinite knowledge to be gained, and I’m surrounded by a group of similarly curious people. It’s nice to be reminded, and to remind others, that we all have something to offer. Once I’ve introduced the session project and it’s on the needles, I used to start by asking when and how people had started to knit. What felt like a benign question, to get the conversation percolating, turned out to be anything but innocuous.

The moment when knitting enters our life is frequently an emotionally charged story to share, as it relates to loved ones or times of upheaval. We are most often taught our first stitches by friends and family (and what’s more complicated than family?). If we didn’t fall in love with knitting in the common childhood bracket of 5 to 10 years of age, many decide to learn or return to knitting at moments of transition in their lives: illness; becoming a parent; joining a new community. Knitting offers a welcome change of pace through distraction, focus, and control. Sharing those stories is fascinating and reinforcing, but they are about our pasts, with all their joys and tribulations. I realise what I am really keen to know is the ins and outs of why the hell people continue knitting. What makes us keep picking up the needles and casting on anew, project after project? Whether for 4 years or 70, why does it still hold our interest?

Because there are many ways to knit a hat.