As the Outcasts have been hanging out together since 2003 – knitting, making stuff, and doing random things – and as Jelly has a lovely new, very old premises – formerly known as The Coopers Arms at 29-31 Market Place – we thought that we could make the Christmas bash extra special this year and invite our favourite makers of beautiful things to take part …
I seem to have a compulsion to combine knit and stones. It’s to do with the hard and the soft, the cold and the warmth, the public and private, the weathering of both, and the letting go. Here are some of the ones I’ve left around the world – many of them in cemeteries – I like the respectfulness and calm. And most of them are red because that seems to be most affected by the light and the rain. And I like that they might be found much later, unidentified and bedraggled. And someone might wonder how they got there.
Pevensey Bay
The Virtuous Well in Wales
Parisian Cemetery
Abney Park Cemetery in London
Cemetery Junction, weathered over the years but still not eaten by the deer, although several others have been nibbled.
And I found thousands of examples in Japan – knitted bonnets and fabric aprons:
and left a contribution
And this is Robyn Love’s ‘It’ s cold outside’ – cozy for Richard Noseworthy, died 1965, Newfoundland.
Kari Steihaug’s boulder, I think in Norway. [Photo by Gunnar Klingvall]
I found a hand knitted and stitched stop motion animation, made and edited by Emily Peterson Dunne on YouTube (I should have been working). I like the tiny room and books, and the woollen sea, and the fact that it always seems to be night-time. It’s seven and a half minutes long, and I’d recommend it if you want to escape for a few minutes.
More from Emily can be found here
There’s going to be a traditional craft fair at the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading this Saturday (06/11). I’m going to be there with my half+half cushions and bags. There are two other knitters involved who I don’t know. Also ceramics, jewellery, embroidery, etchings and painting. And also someone with honey and beeswax. Details about times, venue and cost are on the poster. It’s the first craft fair they’ve held there – all support welcome.
… a conference, held at the new Shetland Museum on the waterfront in Lerwick in September. It was billed as a ‘second interdisciplinary conference, proposing an exploration of knitting from a broad range of practical and theoretical perspectives within the theme of tradition and renewal.’
But what was it like?
Well – stimulating … funny … friendly … intense … divided into themed sessions over the four days. And some of the ones that seemed as if they’d be dull turned out to be interesting because the speaker was enthusiastic and clear and engaging. And sometimes the reverse happened. It was jointly curated by Linda Newington from Winchester and Carol Christiansen from Shetland, and they’d pulled together a range of speakers who looked at the subject from different angles.
Susan Crawford was the keynote speaker for the first session – Tradition and Renewal – and she talked about whether nostalgia is really such a bad thing. This whole session was to do with looking to the past for precedents and inspiration. Nostalgia was seen as a disease in the 1600s, and an indication of suicidal tendencies in the 1800s, but Susan has worked out her own manifesto which says that Tradition + Reinterpretation + Progression = Renewal. And that nostalgia’s not negative but a positive force in the design process, linking to the past while moving ideas forward.
The other speakers in this session talked about
:: anonymous and invisible Shetland knitters, and an attempt to trace their histories
:: fisherman’s dags (fingerless gloves to you and me) but made baggy and symmetrical so they can be shaken off easily and can be put on any way round so they don’t wear out so quickly
:: the Queen Susan shawl – one of the talks that didn’t appeal but was really interesting because of how good the speaker was. A single photo of a hugely complex shawl was posted on Ravelry last year with a request for help to work out the pattern. And within ten weeks, a group of knitters who never met, managed to reverse engineer the shawl and publish the 73 page pattern online.
:: plans to fuse Shetland lace knitting with light. About a community-based project to fuse traditional craft with new technology to create public art for the arts centre currently being built in Lerwick.
The next session was introduced by Deirdre Nelson and was the most interesting of all for me. The talks were grouped together as Artists Crossing Boundaries. Deirdre talked about ‘a quiet activism’ and her work in various residencies around the country. She’s interested in small acts of kindness – knitting for charities or fund raising – rather than big showy projects. She showed some work from her Dangers of Sewing and Knitting project – about bartering knitted socks for gin, and about needlewomen batheing their eyes in whisky to perk up their vision. She also spoke about a residency in Uist which led to a ‘fish exchange’. Local people knitted fish which were auctioned to raise money to train crew for work on the Lfeboats. Then Trevor Pitt talked about his Soft Bench project. He’d wanted to respond in some way to the troubled estate in Birmingham where his family lives, and had invited knitters (“ladies”) to cover a bench using their knitting skills – so it was both an opportunity to work together, and a chance to make an improbable piece of public art. Rachael Matthews then talked about her UFO project – UnFinished Objects doomed to be hidden away – but now distributed to other knitters to finish off in whatever way they liked. Some were restorative, some abstract, and some continued whatever train of thought was sparked off by the story. Lots were very funny.
Annemor Sundbo came over from Norway to be the third keynote speaker. This session was about knitting cultures across the world. She had taken on an old shoddy factory – a bit like a clothes bank where old garments are taken for recycling. She acquired bins full of stuff, and rather than erasing all the work that had gone onto making clothes, she’d tried to unravel the history of traditional knitting by studying the rags. Lots of her research was done by looking at old paintings and photographs, to date the patterns and to find links in the patterns. And she’s now created updated designs based on traditional garments.
Next, some talks about wartime handknitters in America; about Shetland lace knitters who had emigrated to New Zealand in search of work and husbands, and taken their skills with them; and a very in-depth academic paper about research methods. Then one about how a small and isolated island like Fair Isle has influenced knitting in Scandinavia, the Low Countries and Eastern Europe – linking their landscapes, economics, yarns, traditions, etc.
There was also a talk about knit animations. These are the titles if you can find them on Youtube:
:: Les Peaux de Lievres by Tricot Machine (700 real wool knits, animating facial features as people sing)
:: The Last Knit by Laura Neuvonen (think I’ve seen this referred to on Ravelry recently; very funny but I haven’t seen the ending)
:: Learning to Knit by Max Alexander (short and again very funny).
Frankie Owen talked about studying different knitting methods in Peru and demonstrated a strange technique of using five fine, hooked bicycle spokes, and working in the round but from the reverse side and with balls of yarn hooked behind the neck for tensioning, and working mainly with thumbs. I tried to take photos but her hands moved very fast.
And then Emma’s talk about her trip to the Himalayas last summer. The images are so clear and colourful that it’s a pleasure to watch them over and over. And she described the knitted toys that the knitters made up in the mountains which they’re going to sell along the trekking routes to raise money.
On Saturday morning, it was Sandy Black from London College of Fashion, talking about knitting in advertising and popular culture and the image that knitting has now and in the past. Then a rather dull talk about ‘the role of design innovation in relation to the challenges facing today’s Scottish knitwear industry’. Maybe I’d had enough by then. But the morning was revived by a talk about the archive collection of Sarah Dallas’s knitwear from the last 20 years, now at the Fashion Museum in Bath. And then lastly, ending on a very up-beat note, Amy Twigger Holroyd’s manifesto about stitch-hacking and pattern-blogging. She sees that a huge quantity of mass-produced, identikit knitwear is bought and consumed every year. And also that we are often passive makers, following a pattern slavishly. Her manifesto encouraged knitters to make an emotional connection to their work by making their mark on their knitwear, either by stitch-hacking (reconfiguring stitches in an existing knitted garment) or pattern-blagging (modifying an existing pattern to create a personalised item). She encouraged adding names, dates, places to your work, to record the time and effort you’ve invested.
And that was it. Apart from an optional Sunday trip to Unst, the most northerly place in the UK – very open and windswept and wonderful, with a view of the Muckle Flugga lighthouse. And a conference dinner on the Friday night which I didn’t go to but which sounded like a very boozy affair. The conference itself was very intense, with 20-minute talks in groups of three, before a tea break. There was a knitting lounge and a learning room, where there was a chance to try out those padded knitting belts that support one of your needles. But not really time to hang around in those without missing the talks.
And we were lucky to have sunshine almost the whole time so you could dangle your feet over the harbour walls at lunchtimes and watch the boats and seals and birds. Good wool shops in Lerwick too – I can explain to anyone who wants to know that there are, confusingly, two Jamiesons wool shops in Lerwick which are completely unconnected, but both brilliant, and I have the shade charts from both if anyone wants to refer to them.
Glad to have a few days in Shetland afterwards to give my over-stimulated head a rest. And plans for the next conference in two years are already underway.
[photos are either my own, from Shetland Museum and Archives Collection, or from Annemor Sundbo’s website]
