The cultural perspective of the art of knitting and who are knitters is finally starting to catch up to reality. We have long associated knitters with grandmas, setting down their New York Times crossword to quietly knit generic, nondescript sweaters and scarves. We find these knits under the tree at Christmas (if you celebrate) and will never wear them, except on those rare occasions when Grandma comes to visit and mom forces us to pull on that over-sized, seventies-colored garbage bag of a sweater. But a more accurate description of historical knitters is women who, prior to modern industrialization, knit, sewed, and seamed because clothes must be worn, therefore made. Material production was a response to a need. Thanks to industrialization, people today generally have more than one or two outfits. With moderate ease, we are able to purchase any item we need. The need to make our own clothes is no longer part of our cultural experience. Since we have immediate and relatively inexpensive access to clothing and accessories, this begs the question of why knitters are stronger in numbers than ever before. Why is the knitting community made up of men and young folks, people who have not traditionally been responsible for crafting textiles and clothes for families? Why are YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and other social media sites riddled with knitting tutorials, vlogs, and KAL’s.
We no longer produce material objects out of the same necessity described above—we knit, crochet, needlepoint, sew, paint, make art, for pleasure, but also as a response to a need for more accessible mental health counseling, greater acceptance and inclusivity, and as a way to mitigate often unrecognized grief. Queer folx, people of color, women, and other marginalized groups have turned to knitting for community and purpose.
For many fiber artists, the finished object is a lovely, tangible, material representation of talent, enjoyment, time, labor, and energy. But for other fiber artists, the finished object is simply an embodied product that’s value resides in its aesthetic display of the time the maker spent knitting or crafting the object. It is the act of knitting--the repetition, the dippinng into stitches, knotting and looping them up, creating fabric, is what drives knitters like myself. We crave intricate, simple, creative, challenging, comfortable, stitches and patterns because those are the acts that mimic a life. Each stitch, each movement, each knot, each mistake, creates the product, just as those embodied experiences weave together our individual identities and lives. In this way, the pleasure of knitting and fiber arts comes from the moments of creating the object, not in the satisfaction that is binding off a project. Moreover, like-minded fiber artists value finished objects because when we wear those patters—the Tecumseh Sweater, Antler Hat, Free Your Fade Shawl—we relive the experience of knitting that object and the shared experience of knitting the same pattern as our companions in the fiber community.
I first began knitting during lonely and isolated days obtaining a master’s degree in Utah. I had no previous personal knitting experience and had never thought about engaging in fiber arts. I didn’t have any material culture experience at all, except for watching my Nani knit and needlepoint and my mom sew little bags and the occasional clothes and Halloween costumes. In her retirement, Nani owned a needlepoint and fiber arts store, The Creative Needle, in Price, Utah. She ran the shop with her business partner, Stacey Himonas. I think it can be said that my Nani’s relationship with Stacey was queer, in many ways. Though I do not discuss that relationship here, I have explored my Nani’s woman-woman relationships in past projects, focusing on the feminism of material culture and what I call generational feminism. Although I saw examples of my Nani’s knitting and my mom’s sewing, I turned away from these activities because I associated them with women’s work, which I rejected in what I thought was cultural rebellion but turned out to be naive participatory involvement in structures of hegemony.
As I began to interrogate those structures, I felt myself sinking deeper into the trueness of my feminine. I felt drawn to create something out of myself, using my own body. This is when I first began to think about the seemingly obvious connection between grief and material cultural. I felt an instinct to create, to produce, to stitch an extension of myself. Although, and of course, I could never have articulated that feeling at the time I began to knit. I have come to this reflective insight through the act of knitting. My experience is not unique but ubiquitous. The ubiquity is stunning. I have heard some of my quilting friends express many of the same thoughts and experiences, mostly pertaining to the innate, spontaneous need to bring the deepest parts of ourselves to life through the material we create. To a large degree, the finished object represents our truest selves, the selves that are faded out or better understood through our daily performativity.
I don’t know if it was being back in Utah or becoming a wife or just the curiosity of making that converged at that exact moment, but I started knitting during winter break between my first and second semesters of graduate school. At the same time, I had also been thinking more seriously about sustainability and what it might mean to be more conscious of my global footprint. I was playing around with the dream of making all my own clothes, doing more living with a purposeful rejection of capitalism, a phenomenon of which Utahn culture is pervasively imbued with.
Life in Utah created a moment of clarity, out of debilitating grief and loneliness. I was surrounded by thoughts of the women in my life. Though it is a source of shame for inexplicable reasons, Utah is the feminist center orbit of my life. Nani and my mom were raised in Utah. My mother-in-law was raised in Logan, the town where I was attending Utah State University. All three women were makers, laborers in many ways. I became obsessed with what I started to call and write as general feminism. At the same time that I rejected these women and the feminine they embodied, I desired to bring them closer to me—maybe in an effort to obtain answers about my past and my family, maybe to better help me understand myself and the way I belonged in the world. My grandma had died years before I moved back to Utah and my mother-in-law died a few years before I met my now-husband; knitting became a method to recreate relationships with these women.
Even though I had seen my Nani knit many times, I had very little understanding of the process of knitting or the materials really necessary to make a beginning. From my days spent visiting her at her fiber arts shop, The Creative Needle, I knew I could pop into a local yarn shop and ask for help, so I ran over to a local yarn store on Boise’s edge of town. When I walked into the shop with my mom, a sewist but not a knitter, I told the woman-owner that I didn’t know what I was looking for but I wanted to teach myself to knit anyway. For me, I felt the pull to knit so strongly that time seemed to stand still. I was guided by walls of yarn, organized by weights and fibers and color palettes. I squished yarn and felt the fibers between my fingers. I stared at walls of tools: straight needles, circular needles, metal needles, wooden needles, needle gauges, stitch markers, construction materials used to create fabric and garments and gifts and experiences and joy.
I walked out of the store with two sets of straight bamboo needles, size 8 and 10, and two skeins of cotton yarn. And that was it for me. My first project: an orange cotton dish clothe with misplaced yarn-overs, misshapen corners, and dropped stitches. It was absolutely perfect. I began to knit in the English graduate office on Utah State's campus, during office hours, department meetings, any time my hands were free.
Later that year, in my master’s program, I took a class from a professor at Utah State that fo-cused on women writers, especially thinking about a broad definition of writing as it applied to the experience of the feminine. As a class, we thought about archival texts and what women were allowed to contribute to the canon and society and the perceived-efficacy of their contri-butions. From this, I became obsessed with examining the women in my life to better under-stand my identity—feminine and masculine and unnamed--and complex identity and under-standing of women. I also began to attend more closely to women’s labor and the implications of those labors in society and cultures. One of the first pieces we read was a memoiric piece written by the professor of the course. Her essay relayed grief and trauma and sadness through an analytical lens. The way she expressed critical insight was my inspiration for the first piece I ever wrote about generational femininity. From that writing experience, I began to be more and more curious about the relationship between grief, the feminine, and labor association with the creation of material culture.
At the same time, my husband, Leland, and I had been trying to get pregnant ourselves. When we first decided to have a baby, I was blinded by my own history and naiveté, thinking that it would be easy for us since I had been pregnant at least two times before. Looking back on that now, I see that I was a product of society, believing that if a couple struggles to get pregnant then it’s the women’s fault. I didn’t know that male infertility was on the rise. I just didn’t think that could happen to me. Years earlier during an undergraduate class when I still wanted to be a social worker I wrote this offensive, self-righteous paper that talked about adoption and in-fertility in terms that bordered on eugenics, arguing that if a person has infertility then that’s the universe’s way of telling them they shouldn’t reproduce. When I didn’t get pregnant right away, I felt jinxed by myself, by the youth and ignorance displayed in the paper.
I turned those feelings into knitting. I wanted so badly to produce, to make something out of myself. Sometime in the middle of this, I was introduced to some new-age concepts about conception and infertility. One such concept was to invite what I wanted in my life with objects that symbolized its welcome or invitation. As the final project for previously mentioned class, I knit a blanket that turned out too small for me but ended up being a kind of symbolic baby blanket. I also wrote a short paper that looked at the layers of femininity passed down by my Nani and my mom that although was not intended to, created a catharsis for both me and my mother.