Knitting as a grounding practice
Plus news about my latest knitting project
A couple of weeks ago, I became extremely tired as a result of pressure to meet deadlines. It was hard to find enough time to rest. Fortunately, there was an opportunity at the end of the week to focus on my knitting and catch my breath. Once, I’d have judged it self indulgent to nurture myself this way, but now I simply know it to be a feature of my personality. I am what is commonly known as a “highly sensitive person“ who needs “me time“ to recover from the pressure of the outside world.
The outside world is, as we all know, especially chaotic right now. We’ve had a spate of extreme space weather, volcanoes, earthquakes, and floods, with ensuing evacuations of villages and displacement of communities. On the political front, the world seems to have gone crazy, while here at home, The news is full of reports about fraud, corruption, gender-based violence and fires in informal settlements. To add to the mix, each day, my WhatsApp community group contains updates on the latest outages in Electricity and water supply, the result of poor infrastructure maintenance, illegal connections, and theft of cables and parts.
It’s a complete relief to turn my attention to making things. Knitting and crocheting take time and allow my mind to wonder. I like the way a project grows slowly , stitch by stitch, into a soft and cozy fabric. There is something especially grounding about these crafts, with their complete non-reliance on technology. Knitting with hand-spun, hand-dyed fibre puts even more distance between me and machines. Admittedly, high-tech systems play a role in the production of needles and hooks, but I won’t complain about that. I’m not about to go back to using sticks if I don’t have to!
Knitting is in keeping with my value of earth stewardship. To make garments by hand is an act of resistance against hyper-consumerism. Clothing is being manufactured at a rate that is higher than ever before. No longer do people use their clothes until they are worn out. Rather, they are encouraged by Brands to replace them whenever the fashions change. Aided by artificial intelligence, factories cut the cost of production, increasing their capacity for manufacturing non-essential goods. As a result, synthetic clothing gets bought on a whim and discarded just as quickly. It finds its way into landfill sites and poisons the soil.
Against this march of high-speed processing and consumption, there is a quiet but dedicated cohort of fibre artists who have turned there passion for wool and crafts into businesses serving an equally enthusiastic market. Although mills went through a worldwide slump in the mid-twentieth century, new wool producers have been springing up around the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, to name just the countries I know about. South Africa is famous for its Marino wool and Mohair, supporting a fairly robust industry in the manufacture of fabric, blankets and rugs. Yarn for knitting tends to be the focus of the small mills and fibre artists, who enjoy experimenting with blends that include, for example, silk, alpaca, linen, bamboo and nylon. The results are unique. Not only are the colour-weighs beautiful, but the texture and feel are very different from synthetic Yarns. I think, for me, the fact that they are so unusual and hard to come by is part of their appeal; the whole exercise of hunting down makers who spin and dye their own yarn is a bit like a treasure hunt!
A couple of weekends ago, when John and I were in Cape Town, we had time to visit a shop in Simonstown called Natural Yarns, which stocks all sorts of hand-dyed and hand-spun Yarns. The shop is located in an old building on the main street, a Heritage site with many stories to tell, I’m sure. We climbed a very narrow set of stairs to reach the upper floor where the Yarns were displayed in cubby-holes according to wait; that is, chunky weight, double knitting, or fingering weight, also known as four-ply. I needed help to find the kind of yarn I was looking for, and finally settled on a raspberry pink fingering weight yarn in a Marino/linen blend. The pattern I am using is a simple pullover called “Flax” from Tin Can Knits. The designer has a free accessible app which I have downloaded onto my phone, allowing me to easily follow along, no matter where I am in the country or in the world.
It’s been a while since I knitted garments for myself, but I’m hoping to get back into it. Recently, I’ve been updating my wardrobe with a view to packing for overseas travel. This means replacing bulky items that need lots of ironing with lightweight items which do not crease. It includes replacing jackets with jerseys, and blouses with cotton or linen tops. Jerseys and tops are ideal knitting projects, especially when one works top-down and in the round using circular needles. I feel good about having a focus for my knitting, and a justification for investing in natural fibres.
Even so, knitting with Finer wool than I am used to is proving more challenging than I anticipated. After years of working in DK acrylic yarn which is easy to feel in my hands, I’m finding that it’s much trickier to count fingering-weight stitches and keep them on the needle. I’m generally good at recovering drop stitches by feel, because it’s easy to tell whether the stitch is a knit stitch or a purl stitch by the position of the bump in the row below. This is harder when the wool is so thin. Nevertheless, it’s a chance to practice and get good at something new. I know that I can get used to controlling the stitches with time, just as I did when I first learnt to knit.
I will keep you informed on my progress with regard to the sweater. Meanwhile, my charity knitting continues as usual. I’ve decided to work on the Flax sweater in the mornings when I am fresh, and on my garter-stitch squares in the evenings when I am tired and in need of something mindless. With winter being upon us in South Africa, there is always a need for more squares to make more blankets for the children who live in informal settlements or on the street.