   
Knitting's Ancient
Ties
by Rita O'Connell
I learned to knit
when I was 12, sitting across the table from my 11-year-old sister who was
learning it from the book she got for Christmas.
I watched her and looked at the upside-down pictures (Laura wouldn’t
let me read the book, because, after all, it was HER present).
But I learned! And I began
to crochet from that book too, and Mom had already taught me to embroider.
And later I became proficient in lots of other handcrafts, too.
But there’s just
something about knitting that really satisfies me, more than any other textile
art or other craft that I’ve tried. Why
is that? Well, it fills my needs for a hobby that --
¨
is soothing, since the repetitive motion of the needles (point in,
wrap the yarn around, pull the point out) can be very relaxing – I used to say
that knitting was my “psychiatrist”, because it could so relax me after a
mentally stressful day at work
¨
keeps my hands busy whenever time is dragging – keeps me from
being bored AND keeps my mind from wandering when I’m at boring meetings
¨
is portable -- so I can do it wherever I want to at home, and even
take it when traveling
¨
it can be of varying levels of difficulty -- so I can keep
challenging projects to work on at home, but also have easy projects on hand to
take with me to meetings or to work on when my mind is too frazzled for a
challenging project
But, I’ve
realized that one of the biggest parts of the reasons why I knit is because it
ties me back to the Earth and to the entire line of our ancestors.
It ties me to those women and men who worked hard to clothe their
families and provide textiles for their homes.
Knitting has a long history (though not as long as weaving, I think), but
has always been used primarily as a functional art.
Textiles, including knitting, have rarely been used as a solely
decorative art. Yes, they may
be beautiful and certainly can be (and ARE) of art museum quality, but their
underlying purpose is functional – to provide warmth, security, and shelter to
the human body. Think of sweaters,
tablecloths, and tents. And even
toys and tools such as baskets. These
are all textiles.
But textiles are
rarely ONLY functional. Over the
centuries and millennia, women and men have refined the basic crafts to add
their own creative, decorative touches and to add their love to the pieces.
Think about it. Can’t you
find evidence of the hand and mind of the creator in each handmade item that you
see, whether it is textile or not? And
if someone made it specifically for you, can’t you feel their love (and/or
other emotions) in it?
Women and men over
the millennia have refined the technologies to make the simple parts of the
crafts easier to do, so that the decorative touches can be an even greater part
of the creative process. Think
about that, too. Machines, such as
looms and knitting machines, have taken over the drudgery of many kinds of
textile manufacture – for example, how would you like to weave denim on a hand
loom or hand-knit sweatshirt fabric?
And those machines have also been designed to master some of the creative
process, too -- a rainbow of colors can be dyed into or printed on the textiles,
and an array of decorative stitch designs (cables, lacework, etc.) can now be
knitted or woven in.
And even the
hand-work side of knitting has been technologized (if that’s a word).
There are all those synthetic fibers and synthetic dyes that make the
yarns so dazzling to the eye, and so difficult to choose among.
There is an astounding array of knitting needles to choose from –
single points, double points, and one-piece or screw-together circular needles
of many lengths. They are made from nickel-plated steel, aluminum, brass,
bamboo, birch, walnut, ebony, rosewood, bone, plastic, casein (a
milk-based protein), and other materials. I’ve even seen hand-made ones from sharpened hardware-store
dowels, bicycle spokes, or piano wires. And
then there are all the other knitting gadgets! I won’t even go into them!
But how did
knitting start? With a single
strand of yarn and two sticks. And where did the yarn come from? It was originally hand-spun from a local fiber source
– from an animal or plant that produced a hair or plant fiber long enough to
form a continuous thread when a number of fiber strands were twisted together.
Those fiber sources include sheep, goats, musk ox, dogs, rabbits, camels
and their relatives, and cotton, linen, and many other plants and animals.
Since fiber-spinning and weaving predated knitting (or so say the
histories that I’ve read), people
were probably already breeding animals and plants to provide longer and/or more
suitable fibers for woven textiles – the alpaca of South America is a case in
point, since it was bred specifically for the wonderful quality of its fiber.
So whenever and wherever knitting was invented, there was
probably at least one suitable local fiber choice already available.
And my guess is
that knitting became popular for two primary reasons – the flexibility of the
fabric it produces (try to put on a sock that’s woven and not knitted) and
it’s portability (try to take your floor loom out with you while you’re
watching over the sheep). I like to think that it also became popular because you could
go directly from an essentially one-dimensional yarn (length only) to a
three-dimensional object (sweater, sock, doll, etc.), instead of going through
the three-step process that most woven garments require (one-dimensional yarn
which is woven into two-dimensional flat fabric, which is cut into shapes, which
are then sewn together into three-dimensional garments).
So what has all
this technology to do with spirit and ties to the Earth?
Go back to the source of the craft: fibers grown from the Earth (either
from plants or from animals who ate the plants) and the loving and caring of the
women and men who spent extra time to make their knitted items not only
functional, but beautiful and full of love for the people they were made for.
That’s what I tie
into when I knit, that long history and that direct tie into the Earth source.
It doesn’t matter if I’m watching television when I knit, using a
high-tech metal-and-plastic circular needle to knit a synthetic-fiber afghan for
the nephew who I know will wash the final product in the washing machine and
then throw it in the dryer (if he ever thinks to wash it at all).
It doesn’t matter that I’m not meditating or praying over each stitch
or that I’m not using “natural” wood or “natural” fiber – the entire
process and all the components ARE natural (aren’t human beings and all of
their inventions part of the natural world?), as am I. Love is there.
The love is there for the person I’m making the item for (even if
it’s for me!), and the blessings of the ancient textile makers and fiber
producers are with me as I carry forward this functional and beautiful craft.
|
