September 2004

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Knitting Together

Elaine Mar is the author of the memoir Paper Daughter and is a regular Peacework contributor.

Girls of Lincoln Bench School study their reading lesson. Near Ontaril, Malheur County, Oregon, 1939. Photo Dorothea Lange, Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov

Sometimes I have trouble reading. Simple sentences take minutes to slog through. Poetry proves far too difficult. I lose track of the plot in short stories, the themes in essays. My attention wanders even during the most riveting chase scene in the latest best-seller. What causes this problem? There are various culprits: Overwork, personal distractions, political anxiety, mere summertime laziness. Yet even when afflicted by the worst of these, I am not always content doing nothing. Lying about idly, I am inactive but not relaxed, churning my gears to no end. So I fall back on a practice my mother taught me during summer vacations from school as a child: I knit.

The lessons began when I was six or eight or ten -- I forget the specific age, only the cyclical nature of the ritual. Every summer, my mother would sit me outside on the back porch with the same two needles and the same skein of yarn, recycled from year to year. She would teach me to cast on, maneuvering the tip of one needle through a maze of yarn held between thumb and forefinger. She would show me how to work the needles and yarn together to create the knit stitches.

Then the task was mine, to make a flawless scarf by summer's end. I never succeeded. I dropped stitches, or twisted them. I pulled some too tight, others too loose. I learned not to let this bother me, but instead to read the scarf as a chronicle of my progress. Studying my work, I could tell where my mind had wandered, and I let a stitch slip. I saw where I'd become impatient and pulled a row too tight. It was gratifying to find my mental state physically manifest. The experience was unlike schoolwork or other more obviously intellectual activities, where the nature of my mistakes was not always clear.

The first few summers, I knit past my errors, waiting until season's end to hand over a swatch whose stitches read like a chronicle of my moods. My mother commented on my progress, then unraveled the whole thing, winding the yarn back into a ball until the next year. Later, I began unraveling as I went along, stopping as soon as I caught my mistakes. Even so, I understood that the scarf would not be finished, error-free, by summer's end. I fully expected to entirely unravel it before school started.

When I quit knitting in junior high school -- before achieving the perfect scarf -- it was not out of frustration but surrender to social judgment. My mother taught me to knit in the summer, because she couldn't share my passion for the local public library. An immigrant from Hong Kong, she never learned to read English. The branch library I frequented had no volumes in Chinese. I was torn between my mother's folkcraft on the back porch and the promise of educational -- and hence, social class -- advancement offered by the neatly ordered volumes inside the library. I chose the latter.

Historically, knitting has been a craft practiced only by women and the working class. Due to the perishability of natural fibers, it's hard to trace the exact origins of knitting. The oldest positively identified pieces of knitting are traced to Islamic Egypt 1200-1500 CE. The practice was probably spread to Europe through Spain, by the Moors. Its popularity among the European populace spread during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England, who preferred knit silk stockings from France to the more common woven-and-sewn variety produced domestically. Technological advances in the sixteenth century made cheap metal needles more widely available, and knitting became a "suitable" occupation for the English poor; the legal authorities of the time viewed it as an alternative to other activities that might bring this same class of people to their attention.

Export of stockings and other luxury goods spread the craft of knitting throughout Western and Eastern Europe, including Russia, in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The working classes in each country learned the technique to meet the demand for these goods, eventually adapting the craft to their own needs, producing more prosaic garments for their own use. Knitting was brought to the Americas by colonists and missionaries, who taught local populations the technique, perhaps for the same reasons that sixteenth century English authorities declared knitting a suitable occupation for the poor.

Social attitudes about knitting varied by country. In some places, it was done only by the poor, by men and women both, to supplement their income or produce cheap garments for their own wear. In other countries, knitting was considered an appropriate pastime for upper-class ladies as well -- although they made only small decorative household items or children's clothing out of fine wool and white cotton, and made an effort to hold the needles in a manner that was more aesthetically pleasing than efficient.

The latter image of knit-work as trivial -- because it is done by women who have no social function other than to be decorative -- is one that has prevailed. And one might expect a knitting magazine bearing the Vogue name to reinforce this idea. Vogue is, after all, a fashion magazine that emphasizes expensive trendiness. However, in my years of reading Vogue Knitting International, I've been pleasantly surprised. Not only does it publish patterns for knitters at every level, the magazine also includes articles about socially relevant topics.

The Spring/Summer 2004 issue includes an essay on the relationship between feminism and knitting, as well as an article about how teaching knitting to students at a Maplewood, New Jersey elementary school has taught them patience, focus, and perseverance. Previous issues have reported on an Alice Springs, Australia community development project to stimulate interest in indigenous fiber arts, a women's knitting cooperative in Rwanda, a "Mittens for Kosovo" drive, and a church mission in Southern Australia to knit protective sweaters for penguins affected by an oil spill (the sweaters prevent birds from ingesting the toxic substances coating their feathers). No other knitting magazine I've read writes so much about the social impact of the craft.

To be fair, I must confess that other parts of the magazine do focus on trendy fashions, expensive yarns, and equally pricey knitting accessories. Its market is clearly affluent. And on a purely technical note, every Vogue Knitting pattern I've ever used has an error in the instructions. One even printed a correction that needed correction! But these errors are addressed by the magazine's staff, by individual email or on their website.

The errors themselves have taught me a lot about what it means to "read." Many of the women and men who began the tradition of knitting were unschooled in letters, yet had the ability to invent and recall elaborate color and stitch patterns. This ability is in many ways a subversion of sanctioned institutional learning -- a way for those without access to formal education to codify their knowledge. But the process came about kinetically, not symbolically; that is to say, knitting expertise was, and is, developed primarily through action, not words. Translating between the two languages, one physical and sculptural, the other symbolic, is by nature difficult.

I have come to cherish the small errors in knitting patterns, and the challenge they place upon me to learn to read in a different way -- by studying the fabric on my needles. In doing so, I become closer to a long history of other knitters, beginning with my own mother.

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