Crafts

I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace, but it just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…

Knitting and Crochet

Why do I like to knit or crochet? To be sure, since this a kind of memoir, my mother knitted and passed on the bug to my late sister Carol, and I may have been shown how to knit too, but I think the real reason I like to experiment ith stitchcraft is simply the magic – and the perpetual attempt to understand how it works. Knitting offers the same fascination as watching a conjurer, (magic is a concept, not a real thing)and trying to work out how the illusion is carried out – except that knitting is real and produces tangible, useful and beautiful results – if you don’t drop a stitch, that is… I would say that I do understand the process now, especially with Tunisian Crochet and so now, the quest is to finish projects, something I am not always good at doing.

Part of understanding how it works relates to my wider skill as a designer – I want to understand how things are made, which in knitting means increasing and decreasing rows in order to shape the panels that will be sewn together to form a garment. I once did an evening class in Dressmaking where I learned to make myself a shirt – a project that covers many of the skills needed in dressmaking, cutting to pattern, gathered joins, pleats, cuffs and collars and buttonholes. I was living near Brixton, London in those days and as the only male and only white person (other than the teacher, a sometime dressmaker to the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting), I was a source of wonder and amusement to the West Indian matriarchs who made up the class. My father’s contribution to the family’s knitted clothes was to operate the Knitting Machine, which my mother found too technical to master. My partner feels uncomfortable seeing me knit whilst we watch TV (her father wouldn’t have been caught dead knitting), but there are many countries where it is considered normal for men to knit, sew and even embroider – let us not forget the great Kaffe Fassett. When I joined the guerrilla knitting group “Knit a Bear Face” who used to meet in the Victoria Arms, Leeds, I found both men and women happily knitting together.

What is Tunisian Crochet, you may ask, and how did I get into it when in truth, I don’t know how to do ordinary crochet. Well when my mother died and both my sisters and myself were sorting out her apartment (a rare conjunction of the three of us), Carol and I were going through her many knitting needles – both Carol and my mother ran knitting groups and although Carol could probably have deployed the lot in her groups, she insisted that I should have some too. After most were divided, there remained a beautiful tortoiseshell pair of teedles (plastic – no tortoises were hurt in the making of them), and a curious long wooden needle with a hook like a crochet hook at one end. Neither Carol nor I knew what it was for – there is no need for a crochet hook to be long since it never holds multiple stitches, so Carol made an executive decision, “I’ll have the tortoiseshell ones and you can have this!” and she thrust the curiosity at me! Sisters! After I was back at home and I did a bit of research and discovered that this was a needle for Tunisian Crochet – sometimes described as a cross between knitting and crochet, and although the results can resemble either, in fact, it is not like either! I am going to have a little rant against the stitchcraft publishing industry – once upon a time, books of stitchcraft would contain both knitting and crochet and even give patterns which combined the two – a jersey with a panel of crochet inset, for example. But the plethora of books and magazines devoted to crafts has led to ever more specialisation – not just crochet, say, but beaded crochet – all in the hope of selling more copies. So Tunisian Crochet became overlooked for a long time, and it is only by the democratising process of YouTube videos that it is now making a comeback.

So why would you want to employ Tunisian Crochet in a project? Well. it produces a much thicker fabric, which is both stiffer and warmer, and so ideal for say, a coat rather than a cardigan. It has many varieties of stitch giving it lots of different looks, and IMHO, it is very easy to learn – go on – give it a go…

Other posts on stitchcraft:-