needled

Here is a knitted gift, completed this morning. I can show it to you because it is no secret.

Mr B has been party to my knitting of his sweater over the past couple of months and, in fact, played a large part in the design process. He picked out the yarn — which is an undyed Herdwick aran from Fornside farm near Keswick. We bought it at the Wool Clip this October. Both of us love Herdwick sheep. I won’t go on about what a smart and hardy breed the Herdwick is, but these lovely animals are a ubiquitous feature of the Cumbrian landscape and an integral part of our walks in the Lake District fells.

I swatched up several cables for the front panel, from which he selected one design. I had wanted to include cables on the arms, in a similar manner to some recent designs I’ve seen, but he was having none of that. Arm-cables were deemed too fussy. The shaping was very important, because sweaters never usually fit him. Like many men, he actually has a waist — theres a 10 inch difference between his waist and chest measurements — but this (ahem) trapezoid shape is hardly ever reflected in either bought garments or (most) masculine knitwear designs — which tend to assume that all men are rectangular. I based the mathematics and design of the sweater on a combination of EZ and Ann Budd’s instructions for a seamless raglan. It was knit at 4 stitches to the inch in the round from the bottom up. I tapered the sweater to the waist and chest accordingly. It is really an excellent fit.

I am also pleased with the cables, which (to me at least) echo the aesthetic of the masculine torso. Hence the sweater’s name — suggesting how its exterior reflects the interior it contains.

MANTASTIC!

The yarn knitted up lovely. It has a satisfying spring and tremendous solidity — and absolutely no drape at all. To my mind, this is just what’s required in a manly garment. It was, frankly, a bit scratchy to knit with and I imagine even more so to wear. But man fears not the hair shirt. That said, it also has a very high lanolin content, so my hands always felt super-soft after an evening’s knitting.

Man is very pleased with his sweater and sports it smugly. Wearing it, his torso is evidently endowed with magical properties:

Actually, thats just what the winter light did on the bathroom wall a little while ago.

Now it will be blocked and dried and wrapped up in some jolly packaging for a week or so. Merry Christmas, Mr B!

Pattern: Outside In (my own, with help from EZ and Ann Budd)
Yarn: Fornside Herdwick aran. (6 skeins - around 550 grams)
Needles: 5.5 mm & 5mm for rib. (I knit most of it on one 100mm circ)
Gauge: 4 sts to 1 inch.

Work in the one-woman factory of seasonal gifts continues apace. I can now see an end to the process and am having to resist the urge to keep several items for myself. These are both good signs. I shall post about the things I’ve made soon. Meanwhile, from the clutter of objects on my desk, I present thing 2.

I received this thing about ten years ago. Its source was a friend who had a part-time job in an antiques shop. I think he pilfered it. Because the shop was in Sussex, and because of the shingly nature of the beach the women are photographed against, I think they are enjoying a day out in Brighton. It is an ambrotype: an early photograph produced by capturing a positive image with wet collodion on a small glass plate. You see it here larger than its real size — around 3 by 3 1/2 inches. It would originally have been protected in a presentation case. This had disappeared long before it found its way to me, and you can see where the black collodion varnish has flaked off in several places. I have protected the fragile back of the image with a piece of black card, so the clear glass no longer peeks through the gaps in the women’s dark clothes. There were, apparently, several ambrotype photographers in Brighton in the late 1850s and early 1860s. By the mid 1860s more portable and less fragile photographic processes had become popular — so the media in which the women are captured dates this moment on the beach to the turn of the 1860s.

I do not have any photographs of friends or family on or near my desk and these two women are completely unknown to me. They look like friends rather than sisters and seem completely at their ease. With their good boots and capable hands they mean business. There is a quizical look in the eyes of the woman on the right — perhaps she is intrigued by the process of being photographed, reproduced. The woman on the left is more enigmatic and harder to read — but there is a certain confidence in her attitude and gaze. They are respectably but not (for the 1860s) particularly fashionably dressed. The cuffs and bodice worn by the woman on the left are worked in a textured embroidered pattern which is elaborate without being showy.

Beyond these basics — moment in time, location of photograph, good-quality respectable clothing — I have no story to tell about these women and I like it like that. I have not read their letters. I have no sense of their characters, their politics, their desires, their social positions or affiliations. They are not part of a collection of similar objects or images. I am not related to them. There is no fantasy of familial or personal connection. They do not belong to me. In fact, I like them because I am unable to appropriate them — because they are a possession that (to an extent at least) defies possession. I can imagine what I like about the 1860s, about British seaside towns, the history of photographic processes and nineteenth-century women’s social roles. I can tell myself (as I did above) that the women are ‘confident’, ‘capable’ or whatever. But beyond any story I may choose to spin around them, the two women on the beach keep their own quiet counsel.

The image certainly carries commemorative associations insofar as it is a record of a friendship (mine, and the women’s too). But beyond this I am unwilling to invest the ambrotype with any sort of sentimental significance. As a thing among the other things on my desk it has a strange independence. The women are relating to each other and to their moment on the beach more than to me and my clutter. And in its independence — the way that it tells me very little — I find this object both evocative and discomfiting. It says keep your distance, have respect for what does not belong to you. This is sometimes a useful thing to have in mind.

Last night I dreamt I was reading a sweater. I stood at the front of a full room. The sweater was my script and I read aloud from its stitches as if they were braille. Perhaps this dream suggests my mind’s happy ability to mingle together what I do for a living with what I do in my ’spare’ time. On the other hand, it may be a more disturbing indication of how thoroughly the world of yarn and textiles has invaded my subconscious.

Either way, I have had both words and stitches on the brain since my day at the Knitting and Stitching Show in Harrogate. In the quilt competition, my sister and I were both struck by Sara Impey’s contribution:

Sara Impey, detail of Quilt Blog (2007)

Her Quilt Blog is a truly beautiful thing – the sheer quality of stuff and technique really sings out of the stitches. But it is also a serious meditation on the conflict between the momentary and the slow process, particularly as that regards ideas of making. One’s first instinct when looking at the quilt is to understand it speedily, almost instantaneously—to read it as a straightforward message to the viewer from the maker. Following the words from left to right, you quickly trace a narrative questioning the process of making (‘. . . find yourself asking why anybody bothers making things in this age of instant gratification. . . ’). But, in the act of unpicking that narrative you start to notice how the characters emerge out of the negative spaces on the fabric canvas. It is almost as if the quilt is writing itself. Impey stitches only in the spaces between her thoughts. She makes us look at the process of making under and behind the words we read. In so doing, we contemplate the gap between vision and labour—the gap that is the time of the quilt’s making, its slow process. So we are prompted to think in a rather different way about her art, her fabrication. Rather than seeing the quilt as a lovely thing conveying a message to us in a moment, we consider it more fully as an object made over time . . . the time of its stitches . . . a long time! The quilt is both doing, and meditating upon, what it is saying—acting itself out, and thinking about itself with some considerable aplomb.

Sara Impey, detail of Quilt Blog (2007)

The narrative time of stitching was also an issue in the Primmy and Jessie Chorley exhibition. I found Jessie Chorley’s fabric-books and book-fabrications particularly intriguing. Like Louise Bourgeois, Jessie Chorley reflects powerfully on books, stitches and lives as made-up things; as narrative processes; and as numinous objects full of meaning. But though her books are certainly suggestive in their stitching-up of time and memory, I confess I found the Chorleys’ oppressively cutesy household aesthetic something of an impediment to what was most interesting about their art. In that small exhibition space surrounded by the work of the Chorleys’ I felt as if I were trapped in a 1980s fantasy of Edwardian femininity—a sort of hollow Holly Hobbie world with little basis in, or recourse to, the lived traditions of women’s domestic creativity. However carefully considered their familial self-presentation is in its appeal to memory, fantasy, and the uncanny, the Chorleys’ aesthetic had (for me at least) the unfortunate — and certainly misleading — effect of suggesting that their art had little to say to the world beyond itself.

My reaction to the work of Tilleke Schwarz was completely different. Both my sister and I were completely blown away by it and could have spent the whole day with her embroidered canvases alone. In one way or another, Schwarz’s art is often compared to graffiti. She clearly possesses a certain urban chutzpah, but because hers is so definitively an art of stitch and the slow process, I find the graffiti association a little misleading. A more moot association might be with white noise or radio interference — as the momentary or incidental constantly intrudes upon the slow-time of stitching, living, and remembering. All of her canvases somehow suggested aural interference to me. And her mixing of different stitch techniques and genres, as well as the intrusion of other bits of the material world into the stuff of the canvas itself, conveys how the ephemera of everyday life disrupts and yet defines narrative comprehension of ourselves and our histories.

Tilleke Schwarz Beware of Embroidery (1997)

Schwarz has an ability — unparalleled to my mind in contemporary textile art — of mingling wit and poignancy in stitch. In Beware of Embroidery a banner bearing familiar SWEET ‘N LOW lettering flies blithely and bullet-like toward the anguished visage of twentieth-century Jewish cultural memory. In the same canvas, an enormous and slightly scary bottle of brown sauce divides and illuminates a figure whose ghostly whites and reds seem to suggest material pain and spiritual salvation simultaneously. Embroidered cats sport anarchically over every path of meaning. Neat and ostensibly prim cross-stitched figures kick each other up the arse. Overheard snippets of conversation, advertising copy, scraps of text, and the walk-don’t-walk imperatives which allow us to successfully negotiate the confusing labyrinth of ordinary living all gather together, reminding us that there is never the one story to tell ourselves about ourselves. Schwarz’s stitches say that the stories are always going to be interrupted, the narrative constantly disturbed, by the fabric of life itself.

Tilleke Schwarz, Count Your Blessings

In Count your Blessings Schwarz stitches the familiar image of a coffee-cup lid telling its drinker to ‘sip with care.’ In someone else’s work, there might be something obvious about rendering a disposable thing in an art form that is so emphatically not about disposability. But there is nothing obvious here. Schwarz’s coffee cup speaks beyond that simple contrast between the slow-stitch-medium and the ephemeral commodity. It says something about how the disposable might actually take care of the human; about how, even as we wander distracted in a world of terrible, alienating things and events, the cup we drink from will remind us not to burn ourselves. In stitch, the cup is re-appropriated as a messenger of caution and resolve. Yet even as embroidered art lends this thing an agency almost human, elsewhere in her canvas Schwarz reminds us of how chillingly de-humanising the process of appropriation or representation can be: “members of aboriginal communities are respectfully advised,” stitches Schwarz “that a number of people depicted in photographs in this room have now passed away.” It is this dialogic and inconclusive quality of each canvas that is so refreshing and ultimately modest about Schwarz’s art. It is as if just by listening to the symphony of everyday life Schwarz has turned herself into an instrument and played it all back to us—in words and in stitches, with quiet accomplishment, with breathtaking virtuosity. And it is up to us what we make of it in the end.

Images reproduced by permission of the artists.